


your wayward children

by Khio



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming of Age, Family Dynamics, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Linear Narrative, Protectiveness, Wilbur Soot vs the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, Wilbur Soot-centric, and subsequently the Rewards of Being Loved
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:07:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 37,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27781252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khio/pseuds/Khio
Summary: An SBI-centric urban fantasy AU.An angel, a hunter, a chaos spirit, and a not-quite human find family in each other against all the odds stacked against them.But some things were never meant to be; when Wilbur’s dark past inevitably catches up to him and threatens to hurt the people he loves, they’re all forced to discover how far they would go for each other.-Or: It takes a village to raise a child but a family to find and bring him back home. Phil, Techno, and Tommy are up for the job, though, and they will never,evergive up on Wilbur.
Relationships: Alexis | Quackity & Jschlatt, No Romantic Relationship(s), Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit, Wilbur Soot & Phil Watson, Wilbur Soot & Technoblade, Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit, f is for friends (and family) who do stuff together
Comments: 490
Kudos: 1360





	1. i must be haunting you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WreakingHavok](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WreakingHavok/gifts).



> alright! so apparently it takes a metric fuckton of people and a stupid long time for me to write an actual fic huh. i've had this bouncing around in da noggin for a long time now and it feels great to finally get it out into the world :D
> 
> a lot of things in this story are going to be kept vague or untouched, like a lot of the characters’ backstory and worldbuilding and etc, so feel free to have your own hc’s or interpretations!! i’m mainly going to be focusing on the relationships these characters have with each other and their character developments!
> 
> thank you to the CHRISTIN's for all ur support!! <3
> 
> [THANK YOU TO chad (jamie) FOR GOING BATSHIT INSANE WITH ALL THE GORGEOUS ART, I FUCKING LOVE YOU, EVERYONE PLEASE GO CHECK OUT THEIR TWITTER AND SHOW THEM SOME LOVE](https://twitter.com/georgesspotify)
> 
> thank you to mr hank havok hoke for listening to me bitch about block men down in da dms and supporting me through this massive fuckin behemoth and for literally everything !!! ily sm <333
> 
> enjoy the story yall <333

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Family are the people you choose to forgive time and time again. Family are the people you choose to let hurt you in the first place."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to kennie, mis, and bb for beta-ing this chapter !!! <33
> 
> this chapter is written non-linearly; the bold numbers before each section are there so you can keep track of wilbur’s ages!!
> 
> (ps: they're also there because my chapters are long as shit and if you don't feel like reading them in one sitting, i've labelled them with numbers (17, 12, 14, 15, 18, 13, 16, 19, 11 in order for this chapter) so you can ctrl+f to look for them!)

**17:**

There is a darkness underneath the city.

_There is a darkness underneath the city, and Wilbur can feel it like another heart beating in sync with his own pulse, the rhythm of a second life that he hears rushing in his ears._

He feels it thrumming beneath his feet, festering deep underground where the sun can never hope to see. A darkness as foul and rancid as the sewer system it has lodged itself into, claws sinking deep into the ground, so deeply connected to the foundation of the city itself that sometimes Wilbur _swears_ he can feel the heartbeats of the citizens pulsing on his fingertips.

He tries to shake away the last vestiges of his nightmare from the back of his eyelids. Dreams plagued with dark hallways and crimson eyes and whispers, _whispers_ that haunt him so intensely that he wakes up and forgets he has a home, _a family_. All he can see for a terrifying moment are the walls of a desolate sewer tunnel, but then he blinks and he’s back in his bed with Tommy squished up against him and drooling on his pillow.

Wilbur’s hands fly up to cup over his mouth before he can scream and wake his brother up. What comes out is a whimper that he manages to choke down, a strangled sound that for a second he hates himself for making. His eyes snap to the side, looking for any subtle signs that Tommy has picked up the movements and noises he made thanks to his enhanced senses, and is about to berate Wilbur for waking him up.

One of Tommy’s pointed ears twitch, but thankfully, he isn't showing any signs that he's been woken up. Aside from the long, whiplike tail that he's curled around Wilbur's leg and the claws that he's dug into Wilbur’s mattress, that is, which Wilbur shoots a half-hearted glare at; his little shit of a younger brother isn’t satisfied with scratching his own bed to shreds, he’s gotta ruin Wilbur’s too.

(Which reminds him, by the way, he's got to pester Phil in the morning and remind him to replace the mattress that the gremlin motherfucker ruined.)

Wilbur sighs into his hands before opting instead to snake one arm around his brother's torso. Tommy shuffles and mumbles something at that, clawing at the sheets and leaving tear marks in his wake. Casting a glance at the clock on his wall (a plain, numberless piece of junk that Techno gifted him as a joke for his eleventh birthday, but was swiftly integrated into the family and treated as one of their own), he notes down the time — 2:45 AM — and counts how many more hours of sleep he’s got left before he has to get up for school. Four hours. That’s fine, if he falls asleep now, he won’t be miserable in the morning.

Unfortunately, sleep doesn’t come easy for him. Sleep has never come easy for him, not for as long as he can remember. Sleep didn’t come easy when he was a kid and scrambling to get by in an orphanage that never wanted him; sleep didn’t come easy when he ran away and had to survive off stealing and inciting chaos; sleep didn’t come easy when he, 10 years old, had hellhounds sicked on him, and only survived when Phil and Techno found him hiding in an alleyway. 

And sleep won’t come easy now, with a roof over his head and a place he can call ‘home’.

Maybe it’s because whenever he closes his eyes, the dark reminds him too much of a past he can barely remember. He doesn’t like to think about it — doesn’t like to think about how he can feel the void laying dormant where if he never sees it again, it’ll be too soon.

* * *

**12:**

The city is never silent. 

(That’s not entirely a lie, because even in the quietest of nights there will always be a trickster cunt who thinks that disturbing the peace in the streets is a good idea. On nights like these, Wilbur would wake Phil up and bitch about it until his father sighs and brings him along to banish the fucker into the next realm of existence. And since both of them wouldn't be able to go back to sleep — terrible sleep schedules run in the family, it seems — Phil would just take him out for a late-night smoothie where they’d just sit and be tired together. Wilbur never minded nights like these.)

He doesn’t know about everyone else, but he’s never experienced a single moment of pure silence his whole life.

Sometimes he hears voices where voices shouldn’t be, echoing in his ears like they don’t know where else to go. He knows what they are — ghosts, but not the conventional kind, no, _those_ kinds of ghosts don’t belong to this kind of city, not when they’re constantly threatened by the presence of entities and hunters who can yank them straight into the afterlife with a single thought or word.

Instead, he hears the ghosts of the city; moments forgotten in time that only the Earth remembers; people whose names are marked down in gravestones — whose memories are only privy to them, the ground they used to walk on, and coincidentally the malevolent force lurking beneath them.

Usually it’s fine; he can brush it off. He hears laughter echoing through the halls of his house, ethereal in that he never heard it start or end. He hears whispers behind the bus stop next to his school campus, words that escape him before he can properly grasp them and pick them apart. He hears music in the streets, haunting melodies played on instruments and voices lost to time, too stubborn to let go but too sentimental to be forgotten.

It doesn’t bother him for the most part, in fact, Wilbur finds it endearing. It reminds him that life persists, that no matter how hard the universe tries, some things will never be truly gone. He can almost see it in his mind’s eye; a family that used to live where his family now lives; a group of kids who used to plan their mischievous escapades behind the bus stop; songs sung by drunken men who walked home swaying hand-in-hand with their brothers.

It’s a comfort to him, to know that these people aren’t forgotten, and that someday in the distant future they’ll remember him, too.

But sometimes, it overwhelms him. The problem with being so connected to the city’s history is that he hears the… bad stuff, too. 

Sometimes he hears screaming. 

The city has a violent history — what doesn’t, really? Wars were fought on this land. Blood was shed, lives were lost, and somewhere along the way the Earth remembers it, too. He hears it all; innocents mauled by creatures of the night; spirits gone rogue and hellbent on vengeance; children wandering too far away from their homes and too close to fair folk territory. 

(Once, he heard a shriek tear through his house. A call for help, wet and choked and in horrible, _horrible_ agony. It had sent him into a blubbering mess, sobbing and shaking violently at the sheer pain he’d caught in that voice. It has taken Phil hours to calm him down, and even then, Wilbur couldn’t sleep for days afterwards, couldn’t shake off the memory of the scream.)

* * *

**14:**

On days that the ghosts speak too loudly for him to brush them off, he grabs his guitar and takes a walk down to the ocean. 

It’s a twenty minute walk if he moves at a brisk pace — enough to clear his head, put some distance between himself and the heart of the city where the darkness is most concentrated. It’s enough to put himself back together where he’d previously been breaking, shimmering, fragmenting around the edges, feeling like he’s balancing on the tip of a needle, or watching a car crash in slow motion, or falling along the length of a cliffside where the sea meets the rocks below.

It’s why the ocean calms him down so much, he thinks. Why he loves to sit on the pier with his toes dipped into the water, absently picking at his guitar and staring off into the horizon. He feels all of it; the wind brushing his curly hair like a tender caress; the gentle rippling of the water as he sways his legs; the sound of his guitar coupled with the rush of his blood in his ears. It reminds him that he’s human, that he’s still breathing and his heart’s still beating and that everything going on in the mess that is his head _will_ eventually pass.

Today, though, today Tommy caught him halfway out the door and demanded to come with, chattering on and on about his best friend Tubbo who lives down by the docks and how it’s been a while since he’s visited him and how he's been thinking of becoming a hunter like Techno and Wilbur stops listening as soon as Tommy starts talking about bees.

It takes them almost forty-five minutes to walk to the ocean, since Tommy keeps trying to derail them, his electric blue eyes bright with excitement as he scopes out potential sources of chaos, buzzing with untamed energy all in his irises, in his very nature. Wilbur would catch him every time — the moment Tommy shuts up about whatever he’s talking about, his eyes locked on an unsuspecting victim, he’s ready to grab him by his collar and keep the two of them back on track. 

Tommy would whine every time, threatening to claw Wilbur’s hands right off his scruff, moaning and bitching about how _fun_ it would’ve been, knowing full-well that Wilbur would enjoy it too. He’s way too smart for his age; he’s only eleven and he knows how to read Wilbur like a fucking book. Unfortunately for the both of them, Wilbur just wants some peace and quiet, some time to enjoy the afternoon with a bit of music.

Not like Tommy would understand, being the literal living incarnation of chaos, but he deserves some credit, yeah? His very nature might exude chaos — and living with him makes Wilbur want to tear out his own hair in frustration more often than not — but Wilbur likes to think that Tommy’s a little more… sympathetic, maybe. 

(And not like he’d ever tell him, or even admit it out loud, but the only reason Tommy hasn’t torn apart the family in a massive fireball is because Wilbur is right there to keep his chaos in check. It helps to keep himself sane too. A… symbiotic relationship of sorts, if Wilbur dared to call it that, of which only one party is aware.)

Speaking of the gremlin motherfucker, Tommy scampers off as soon as they take a turn and the ocean comes into view, a half-hearted goodbye at the tip of his tongue as he races down the street towards the general direction of Tubbo’s house. Wilbur sighs, calls out an ‘ _I’ll ring you when I’m ready to go home_ ’ which he hopes Tommy’s ears will pick up, and saunters down the path to the docks, looking out for a secluded spot where he can play some music and have nothing but his own thoughts to accompany him.

He finds an open spot with a good view of the horizon and settles down, taking off his shoes before carefully lowering his feet into the water. The chill sends a shiver up his spine, and he shudders at the pleasant feeling. This far away from the heart of the city, he can’t hear the ghosts as clearly anymore.

His fingers move to pluck the strings, playing a melody he’d been practicing for the past couple days in his room. He looks out into the ocean, at the gentle waves that crash lazily against his skin, casting his gaze upon the water where he can never quite catch sight of any fish. It’s strange, but he finds that he doesn’t care to find out why.

Wilbur loses track of time somewhere after the fourth song, head void of any thoughts but the simple comfort that life brings him. He’s only snapped back to reality when he realises he’s got an audience, someone watching him from an opposite branch of the pier. 

The girl — with soft, curious eyes and hair that flows like the sea — realises that he’s looking at her, and smiles as she waves at him. 

Wilbur grins back, unsure what to do, and in a bout of bravery, says, “Do you have anything in mind you want me to play?”

“No, no, I just like hearing you play,” she says, shrugging. “You’re very talented at the guitar.” She’s got a vaguely northern accent, he can tell from the way she pronounces her ‘d’s. The compliment hits him where it hurts the most and Wilbur smiles, ignoring the way he can feel his ears heat up.

He turns to face her properly and starts strumming an upbeat tune, watching as she lights up and nods her head to the beat of the song. As she sways along to the music, he grows braver by the second; he’s brave enough, in fact, that he starts belting out whatever lyrics he can remember, filling in the gaps in his memory with mumbles. She seems delighted at this, and recognises the song, too, because she picks up at the chorus, singing along with him. The girl has a wonderful voice, he thinks, albeit untrained in the way she struggles to reach some notes, but neither of them care, too caught up in music and laughter.

Wilbur ends the song with a powerful shred and grins up at the girl, puffing his chest out proudly as she gives him a round of applause. 

“Can you teach me?” she asks. “I’ve always wanted to learn an instrument, but... I don’t know where to start.”

“Of course!” Wilbur flushes even more, bewildered at the prospect of someone appreciating his skill enough to consider him a teacher. “If you could come over here, uh, I can- I’ll teach you some basic chords and strumming patterns.”

She smiles wider at that, if it’s even possible given how they haven’t stopped smiling for even a second. To his surprise, she stands up on the pier and takes a step into the water — but she never sinks, and she’s walking as if on solid ground until she reaches his side and sits next to him.

A nymph, he realises, either a naiad or a nereid but it doesn’t really matter. He sees it more clearly now, the walking on water, the infatuation to music, the hair that never stops waving in the wind. And now that he thinks about it, her voice carries a weight behind it, a gentle timbre that reminds him of everything beautiful and kind about the sea, but with the potential of a storm’s power, of furious waves capable of sinking even the toughest of ships.

“I don’t think I’ve properly introduced myself,” Wilbur says. He offers her a hand and his most charming smile. “I’m Wilbur.”

She takes it. Her hand is small and warm in his and it feels like cupping water in your palms. “I’m Niki. Now, you wanted to teach me how to play the guitar...?”

They stay there for far too long, talking and laughing and playing music way past the two hours Wilbur had initially intended to stay for. This is how he loses time, humming songs and sharing stories with his newest friend, someone who captivates him as the sea captivates a sailor. Which is probably why, he thinks, because Niki _is,_ at the end of the day, a water nymph, and Wilbur has always loved the sea. It’s probably selfish, but he doesn’t much care. 

(And during one of the songs, Niki — eyes creased from all the smiling — reaches over and loops a lock of Wilbur’s curly hair around her index finger. Wilbur stills at that, feeling heat creep up his neck, remembering stories that Phil told him of nymphs twirling their companions’ hair as a sign of friendship. He doesn’t stop blushing for a long time after that, and she doesn’t hesitate to tease him about it.)

Eventually, the sky turns a golden hue as the sun starts to set, and Wilbur checks the time on his phone. He winces at the number on his screen, and excuses himself to call Tommy.

The call never gets answered, because after five rings, Wilbur hears a yell from a little distance away and looks up to see Tommy, waving one hand in a wide arc and clutching his best friend Tubbo’s hand in the other.

“Ey big man!” Tommy yells, his grin wide and fanged, as he starts dragging Tubbo towards Wilbur and Niki. Tubbo looks sheepish, casting glances around. He tugs Tommy’s arm and stand on his toes to mutter something in Tommy's ear, which only serves to make Tommy laugh and dismiss it with the wave of a clawed hand.

Before Wilbur can greet the pair, Niki cuts in. “Tubbo! Oh, hey Tommy! I didn’t know you were around,” she says, setting Wilbur’s guitar on the ground next to her. The pair answer her with matching ‘hello’s. “You guys want to join us? My new friend Wilbur’s been teaching me how to play the guitar.”

Wilbur feels his eyebrows shoot up as his brain short-circuits. “Wait- you guys know each other?”

"Well, yeah,” Tubbo answers, “she’s my sister. Oh, wait, Niki, this is Tommy’s brother- you know, the ‘Will’ I told you about a couple times before.”

“Oh!” Wilbur slaps a hand over his mouth. “Oh, wow, I should’ve realised-“

Niki smiles, and laughs, and it sounds so much like Tubbo’s laughter that Wilbur’s surprised he never made the connection before. But then again, she’s a nymph and as far as he’s gathered from Tommy’s rants, Tubbo’s a human through and through. Though they’re probably siblings like how Wilbur and Tommy are brothers, too.

Speaking of the rat child, Wilbur feels dread pooling in the bottom of his stomach as Tommy looks between them, his mouth curling at the edges as his eyes glint with mischief. His tail starts bouncing, something Wilbur _swears_ to make fun off afterwards, and he chuckles low in his throat. “Oh, big dubs, you found yourself a woman, now you can’t refuse when I ask to see big T, eyy, big man Wil-bah, this must be so awkward for you-“

“We’re- I’m not- the _fuck_ -“ Wilbur splutters, “Tommy- you _motherfucker_ -“

“-oh dude you must feel so awkward right now, look at you all blushing and shit. Tubbo, Tubbo look, his ears are red and all, oh big man just you wait until Phil hears about this-“

"-I hate children, I fucking hate children, Tommy you absolute _dickhead_ , can you just shut up, for Prime's sake-"

"-you can't use that fuckin' argument against me, you're a _child_ too, idiot-"

Even while embarrassed to shit, Wilbur can’t help but laugh along when Niki throws in a quip or two against Tommy, commenting on his clinginess to Tubbo. And when Tubbo confirms this with a deadpan voice and a serious expression cracking at the edges, Wilbur loses it, and soon the tide of the conversation turns on its head, making Tommy the victim of his own losing battle.

And later, they settle down and sit in a circle, dangerously close to the edge of the pier. Wilbur shoots a text to Phil letting him know that they’ll be home a lot later than expected, to which Phil sends back a flurry of angry emojis, all of which are sent lightheartedly. He knows that their dad doesn’t mind as long as he sends him semi-frequent updates, and in that moment he feels so fucking grateful for Phil.

Wilbur leans back against a pole and watches as the other three engage in an intense game of cards using the deck that Tubbo brought with him. He lost horrendously a few rounds ago (he’s never been good at strategy games) and opts instead to play his guitar while waiting for the game to be over. 

Looking around their little group, it hits him, then, a realisation that sends a lump up his throat and makes him pause his playing long enough for Tommy to shoot him a glance: _he wouldn’t trade this for the world_. 

This, this moment, this feeling that erupts in him; when he stretches his long legs out across the wooden boards; when he feels his fingers aching from hours of guitar-playing; when he brushes hair out of his eyes and feels the last rays of the dying sun brush against his nose, his eyelashes, his parted lips, and his hand casts a shadow over his face as he squints at the blazing horizon through the gaps between his fingers; when he breathes in and the air fills his lungs and he feels wholly, completely, and utterly human.

He wouldn’t trade _any_ of this for the world, he thinks, he knows, he almost says.

Not when Tubbo gives up playing and instead tries to sabotage the game, causing Niki to win with a holler and a victorious fist pump. Not when Tommy throws his cards into a pile in the centre and bitches about wanting to stab shit. Not when Wilbur’s smiling so widely it almost splits his face in half and laughing so hard he cries, and letting his wildest, most delirious cackle out into the world for all to hear, like he’s got no care in the world, like all of this is easy for him, like he’d do anything to make this moment last forever.

* * *

**15:**

The life of a hunter is a strange one. 

Sometimes Wilbur wanders his house in the middle of the night and hears the door slam open, two delirious hunters stumbling in and crashing into the couch; Techno and Dream — rivals to no end and inseparable friends beyond their endless competition — come staggering in, covered in blood and bruises after an intense hunt out in the city.

Sometimes a feral creature or a particularly vengeful fae manages to break into their house, looking to gut Techno for messing with them or their unit, only to be banished by Phil with a long sigh and a wave of his hand. Afterwards, he would pull Techno aside to go on a long lecture on the importance of maintaining protective wards around the property, not that Techno doesn’t already know, he just got careless, is all.

Sometimes Wilbur receives a text from Dream to fetch them salt or mountain ash or whatever fucking thing they forgot to bring, and he’ll barge in on the pair sitting on the floor next to a rogue spirit thrashing inside a salt circle, sharing a bag of crisps and playing the audio of some Latin chanting from Techno’s phone. 

It’s strange — Wilbur won’t deny it, in fact, he’ll be the first one to make fun of them for all the hot shit they inevitably find themselves in. He respects the grind, the dedication and the ingenuity and the balls of steel: of not immediately pissing themselves when confronted by a grotesque creature from the next dimension over. He respects it, but that doesn’t mean he’ll stop teasing the fact that Tubbo, as young and impressionable and stupid as Tommy is, looks up to both Techno and Dream and wants to follow in their footsteps.

Sometimes hunting involves fighting back hordes and hordes of feral spectres to protect your city and all its people. Sometimes it involves running for your life from a particularly angry pack of hellhounds. Sometimes it involves choking the warped syllables of a dead language into the air, feeling it tear through your throat, but you know you can’t give in or else the spell will backfire horribly.

But sometimes hunting involves lounging about the edge of the forest with Tubbo (“Tommy’s off to fuck-knows-where,” he had said, “you’ll make a great temporary partner, c’mon!”), a few feet away from a pyromancer that Tubbo had been called to deal with and had subsequently tracked down and trapped in a circle of mountain ash. Sapnap has been whining the whole time, throwing a hissy fit in the confines of the circle, complaining about how _it was only for fun, c’mon, it’s not like I’m going to set George’s entire forest on fire, dude let me out, please, Dream’s gonna be so mad that I tried to mess with George again-_

In an attempt to tune out all the whining while waiting for George to get there, Wilbur pulls Tubbo aside and strikes up a conversation with him. Talking about anything that comes to mind, both desperate to bore out Sapnap and shut him up. 

Between all the small talk, Wilbur asks a question he's been meaning to ask the young hunter. “Have you considered any patron deities?”

Tubbo’s eyes light up, and he opens his mouth readily to answer. He freezes — hesitating — then deflates. “Yeah,” he says, voice unsure, “but I don’t know if… if it’s the right choice, y’know? Not that any patrons would be a bad choice,” he backtracks quickly, in case any stray gods or spirits are listening, “but I’m not sure if they’d… if they’d want me.”

“Oh?”

Wilbur sidles up closer to Tubbo where they’re both sitting against a tree, hooking an arm around his shoulder. Tubbo sighs and leans his head against Wilbur's collarbone, his fluffy brown hair brushing against Wilbur's skin, tickling his neck slightly. 

“That’s stupid,” Wilbur says, “they should feel lucky that you even considered them in the first place. Tubbo, man, you’re a great hunter and a cool dude, _of course_ they’d want to be your deity, who wouldn’t?”

“Wilbur…” Tubbo mutters, a nervous smile creeping up his face. “You can’t just say things like that.”

“But it’s true!”

“Oh Primes, oh man, okay, realistically I know they probably wouldn’t reject me but… I don’t know if they’d want to be, you know, weighed down by a hunter…” he trails off.

Wilbur is quiet for a moment. There’s only one entity Tubbo would really consider, only one person he’d wholeheartedly trust his entire life to like that. The bond developed between a hunter and a deity has to be strong, has to be mutually loyal, and both parties have to trust the other without question for it to work — for both sides to reap the best rewards. 

Exactly like the bond shared by the unlikely pair of a chaos spirit and an aspiring hunter; inseparable through thick and thin, both too stubborn and too protective of their star-crossed friendship- _brotherhood_ , to ever let anything get in its way.

“Okay,” Wilbur says. “That’s still stupid.” He pauses. “I’m sure he would love to have you as his hunter.”

Tubbo groans. “Am I that obvious?” 

“Nope,” Wilbur smiles down at him. “I just think it’s super sweet.”

“Oh.” 

Tubbo mulls it over in his little head. After a while, he reaches up and loops a lock of Wilbur’s fringe around his finger, effectively turning him bright red. He really needs to stop blushing every time someone does it to him — he’s only giving Niki the ammunition she needs to tease him. 

“This sucks, Tommy isn’t here to farm ‘aww’s,” Tubbo says, earning a bark of laughter out of Wilbur and a snort from Sapnap, who’s apparently quit bitching about being trapped and instead has started listening to their conversation.

“I don’t think he likes ‘aww’s.”

“You’re right,” he says, in a completely serious tone. “PogChamp.”

“PogChamp,” Wilbur agrees earnestly.

“You guys are losers,” Sapnap interjects, “but PogChamp.”

A beat, and all three of them break into laughter, doubling over and kicking the ground with their feet, sending leaves flying everywhere.

(Later, George arrives, his expression turning sour as soon as he sees Sapnap’s smug face, dread written all over his face at the teasing that’s bound to come with being a part of their little extended friend group. 

“Say the line, George!” Sapnap yells, elbowing his friend on the shoulder.

George sighs, and it sounds vaguely like the rustling of an animal in a bush. “I am Gogy, spirit of the forest,” he obliges, utterly defeated, “and I speak for the trees.” 

He buries his face in his hands and groans as Sapnap and Wilbur howl in laughter. Tubbo clasps his hands behind his back and bows his head solemnly at him, a gesture of condolences that he's picked up from the furry fuck he calls his brother. 

George scrunches his nose at the mock-pity. “Primes, I can’t even see the stupid colours, this sucks, you guys suck-”

“We know,” Wilbur cuts in, grinning mischievously at the sombre look on George’s face. This, here, laughing with friends and teasing one of them to the ends of the Earth, the day ends with warmth swelling in his chest, filling his body with a golden glow that he feels only when around certain people: friends, family, the people who he loves to no end.)

* * *

**18:**

There is a darkness underneath the city.

_There is a darkness underneath the city, and Wilbur can feel it spark alight a fuse in him, a tic at the back of his neck or an itch in his belly he can’t scratch, a temptation of violent, empty promises he can never bat away completely._

There’s a reason why he fits in so well with Phil, with Techno, with Tommy. Any outsider would look in and turn their noses at the patchwork family they’ve scraped together out of orphans and runaways; anyone would raise an eyebrow at them, a family unit consisting of Philza the Angel of Death, Technoblade the Warrior Hunter of the Patron Blood God, Tommy Innit the Spirit of Chaos Incarnate, and Wilbur Soot the everyday human boy.

Because he’s got a secret; he’s not human, not quite. Well, he is, mostly, or at least he likes to convince himself he’s human. 

Eighteen years ago, an angel descended upon the city to smite an ancient darkness hidden underneath, and a part of that darkness, terrified and unready to die, unlatched off the sewer walls and found a baby born breathless and soulless to a dying mother and an absent father. It had assumed the baby’s life in an instant and that night, Wilbur Soot was born, his pulse miraculously starting up minutes after he was pronounced stillborn.

Of course, he remembers none of this. What he _does_ remember is the fear that gripped him tight and froze him in place when he was 10, shivering in an alleyway littered with the fading bodies of hellhounds, face-to-face with the very angel that was tasked with smiting him. 

Except Phil hadn’t ended his life with a fiery death, no, all he’d seen was a human boy who stole the wrong thing from the wrong warlock, and quickly took Wilbur under his wing and care, unaware of his true nature.

And it’s days like these, when Wilbur’s sitting alone and bored in his room that he’s grateful Phil took him into this family. Because that tic, that itch, that temptation, it all grows louder and louder and soon he finds he can no longer focus on completing his schoolwork. His very nature demands it, and he’s already thumping on Techno’s door, whining about being bored and wanting some action, “-a hunt, Techno, maybe? You got any cases recently? Something, something you can take me out with you, man, c'mon, I’m _bored_ ,” and he makes sure to drag out that last syllable for effect, “Techno, hey, if you don’t have anything I’ll ask Tommy instead-“

The door swings open mid-knock and Techno glares at him, bags under his dark blue eyes and wearing the usual grumpy expression. “It’s three in the _goddamn_ mornin’, Wilbur, what the _fuck do you mean you want to go out on a hunt_ -?”

“It’s three?” Wilbur asks, completely chipper, “I hadn’t noticed, oops,” he had, but it was _so_ worth it to sap up the annoyance radiating off his older brother, “look, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I’ve got too much pent-up energy tonight, man, and if you’re not gonna do it-“

“Then you’ll get Tommy instead, yeah, yeah I know,” Techno huffs, rolling his eyes exasperatedly. “Alright, just- stay there, gimme a moment-“

He walks back inside, picking at his tusks and muttering something semi-incoherent about his inherited piglin teeth. Wilbur can’t help but grin — Techno did, after all, ask to have meat for dinner, and now he’s gotta pay the price when he gets a shred stuck between his teeth.

(Techno has a terrible underbite, and an even worse teeth alignment until Wilbur and Phil pestered him enough to get braces — which was hilarious, by the way, the orthodontist had no idea what to do with the tusks that came with being a rare piglin hybrid, and almost shat himself when the infamous Technoblade showed up at his clinic, which Wilbur made sure to note that fiasco down in his Calendar of Cringe— and while Techno bitched about it for weeks, Wilbur knows that he, albeit begrudgingly, admits that he looks a lot more presentable now. And besides, Wilbur had a constant source of misery to sap up for almost three years.)

“-you ready? Let’s go.” 

Techno snaps his fingers in front of Wilbur’s face, effectively, well, _snapping_ him out of his reverie. He’s already halfway down the hall when Wilbur composes himself and scrambles after him, trying hard to stamp down the bounce of excitement in his steps. They leave the house as quietly as they can, knowing full well that Tommy might catch them at any second and rat them out to Phil just for shits and giggles.

“Case?” Wilbur asks, as soon as they’ve both settled into Phil’s car. 

Techno fumbles with his seatbelt for a moment — which is kind of dumb, because here’s Technoblade, the famed Warrior Hunter of the Patron Blood God, worrying about some safety precautions — before tossing his phone to Wilbur. 

“Not urgent,” he says firstly, starting up the car as Wilbur looks through the details. They’re safe; if Tommy catches them now, they’d be long gone by the time Phil can wake up from his slumber. “Feral pixie infestation in an abandoned warehouse, the usual.”

“The one down by Niki’s place?” Wilbur asks. He hears a yell in the distance and can’t tell if it’s real, not tonight, not when he’s too tired to care and too awake to be completely sane.

Techno pulls the car out the driveway and squints at the windshield. After a beat, he pushes his square glasses higher up his nose. “Uh... probably? Well, to my knowledge, there’s only one abandoned warehouse that they like to infest.”

Normally, Wilbur would be down to herd some feral pixies back to the fair folk, but he’s _really_ not in the mood to deal with all the hidden clauses and shit in the paperwork they’ll force on him and Techno after they lock up the pixies. Sometimes it’s fun to find loopholes in their loopholes and engage in a battle of wits, but tonight he’s looking for something different. Something more... intense.

“Ehh, boring,” he decides. 

Techno hums an affirmation. “Swipe left.” Wilbur does. A new case appears on the screen. “Not urgent,” he starts. “Reports of a wendigo up by the forest. No deaths — _yet_ — but they’ve caught trails and CCTV video footage.” 

Now this? This looks way more attractive, what with the promise of the thrill of the hunt, of adrenaline coursing through his veins at the prospect of being mauled by the thing (not that either of them will, Techno’s too good at his job to let him or Wilbur get hurt by a single wendigo). Unfortunately, Wilbur doesn’t feel like going on a long-winded speech to remind the thing of its relationships and humanity and past life. 

“Pass,” he says.

“O...kay, alright, I see how it is.”

Techno stops the car at a red light, in a four way intersection. This late at night (or this early in the morning, depending on how you see it), they’re the only car in the road.

“Your pick. Ahead, Niki’s place. To the left, the forest. And to the right, semi-urgent, your average run-of-the-mill cultists tryin’ to raise the Wither again.” He taps a hoofed finger on the steering wheel, raising an eyebrow at Wilbur. 

Wither cultists. Wilbur’s heard of Techno dealing with them before, but he’s never tagged along on a case like that. It’s almost comical how resilient they are, how dedicated to their plot of utter world destruction they are (normally he’d perk up at the thought of some good ol’ chaos but _man_ , this just isn’t the way to go about it), and how hard they try to fight back. No contracts and negotiations, no heartfelt speech about holding onto humanity, just a good fight and a solid clean-up afterwards.

They both know the answer even before Wilbur opens his mouth to respond. “Take the right,” and Techno obliges. He almost feels bad for the cultists they’re about to send back to the Nether. 

Almost. 

Mostly, he’s just trying to contain the joy that blooms in his chest; the way his whole being _sings_ in elation and the way he feels the darkness beneath the ground stir awake from its dormancy, giddy at the thought of all the havoc he’s about to wreak. 

He should feel guilty, but that’ll probably come tomorrow when the weight of his existence comes barrelling back onto him like a freight train. For now, there’s only him, the ecstatic grin splitting his face in half, his leg bouncing against the floor of the passenger seat, and the night that comes alive and ablaze with excitement. 

* * *

**13:**

“Um.”

The two figures freeze where they’re rummaging through the backroom, sifting through boxes and leaving a mess behind. They turn to look at Wilbur, and in the low light, it doesn’t even cross his mind that they might be dangerous, that his life might be in danger, because the two pairs of eyes looking into his belong to two _kids_ his age.

“Hello…”

Distantly, a part of him realises that he’s just walked in on two thieves, and that same part thinks that maybe he should find someone to deal with the situation. That same part is dumb and also a complete fucking loser, though, because he’s just been presented with an opportunity. An opportunity to _what_ , exactly, he hasn’t decided.

“Nothing to see here, pal,” one of them snarls at him, their shocked gaze quickly turning into a glare meant to intimidate him. Their eyes glint a bright yellow in the dark, he notes. Unfortunately for them, Wilbur has no sense of self preservation.

“You’re stealing,” he says.

The other snorts. “Duh,” they say. “What does it look like we’re doing?”

“Stealing…”

The two kids exchange a look, and one of them makes a strange noise at the back of their throat, something between a snort and a snarl. Wilbur hears a phantom’s whisper warning him of danger and brushes it off with a slight shake of his head.

“You wanna move along, buddy?” the first one asks as they turn towards Wilbur, threat clear in the way their- his accented (pronounces his o’s and his g’s weirdly, probably a more western accent) voice drips with venom. “Like I said, _nothing to see here_.”

“Not particularly, no,” Wilbur replies. 

Tommy might be the most reckless one of their family, being so quick to pick fights with people, and Techno comes in at second with those self-sacrificing tendencies of his, but Wilbur likes to think that these moments are why Phil doesn’t quite trust him to take care of himself, either. Poor Phil, the man never catches a break with three hazards to his sanity living under the same roof as him.

“Listen, _buddy_ ,” the kid growls, moving away from the boxes to step menacingly towards Wilbur. As he straightens and walks into better lighting, Wilbur notices he’s got furred goat-like legs and a pair of grey horns jutting out his temples — a satyr, though Wilbur has no idea what one is doing this far away from the forest. “If you don’t get out right fuckin’ now, we’re gonna have a problem in our hands-“

“Schlatt!” the other kid yells (what the fuck kind of a name is Schlatt?), pointing at the doorway to the room. 

Wilbur whirls around to find someone standing there, their hand already reaching for their phone.

His stomach drops. 

_Oh, oh no_.

And then it happens. Wilbur feels a gust of wind hit his face, blowing his hair into his eyes and making him splutter and gasp. A hand yanks him by the shoulder and he flails backwards, his long legs tripping over themselves in an attempt to gain purchase on the ground, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s being pulled and light breaks into his vision and he can’t feel the ground anymore because he’s rising, rising-

“What the _fuck_ -“ his heart leaps in his chest when he realises he’s not in the building anymore, and there are bits of broken glass stuck to his pants, “ _did you just break the fucking-_ “

He never gets to finish his sentence, because he makes the mistake of looking down and _holy fuck he’s FLYING-_

“Stop struggling or I’ll fucking drop you!” a voice yells out from above him and Wilbur snaps his gaze up to see him shadowed by a pair of avian wings (a mallard, he can tell by its feather structure and colouring), too small to be carrying one person let alone _three- oh Primes the kid’s carrying the weight of three people-_

_“Watch out!”_

They narrowly miss an obstacle — a stray telephone pole, but the sudden movement throws them off-balance and _fuck he’s about to die-_

“Oh mother _fuck_ -“

“ _Alex!_ ” 

Wilbur’s concern didn’t come completely out of nowhere, because suddenly the three of them are plummeting towards the ground. He hears frantic flapping, and sees a mess of tangled limbs and goat fur and there’s a horn pressing painfully into his side and-

-and he-

A force knocks into him. No, no that’s not quite right, it feels more like a force grabbing onto him and throwing him fuck-all through the air, and Wilbur feels breathless, weightless, flung at light speed through time and space and a few bugs along the way ( _this is why Phil tells him he always closes his mouth when flying_ ) and he tries to suck in air or cry out but nothing comes out, his own voice can’t catch up to him-

It’s over as quickly as it happened.

Wilbur blinks away dust from his eyelashes and coughs once, twice, and gasps in a breath until his lungs can’t take in any more. He’s lying face-up in a small clearing in the forest, decidedly _not_ in the middle of the city, where he’d just been a few seconds ago. Beside him, the two kids — Schlatt (?) and Alex — are wheezing, too, and Alex is already getting up, his knees trembling.

“Alex, man, please,” Schlatt coughs, “ _please_ warn me next time you do that.” He’s kicking his goat legs in the air, brushing off bits of glass from the fur. If Wilbur ever sees these kids again, he won’t shy away from the ‘furry’ jokes.

“Wh- the fuck am I supposed to do there, Schlatt? I can’t just- stop mid-fucking-air, I don’t even know how to fucking fly properly, Prime-“

“Oh Primes,” Wilbur gasps. He sits up abruptly and stares deep into Alex’s eyes. “You can fly _and_ teleport?”

Schlatt and Alex exchange looks, and the former pulls his companion’s arm, tugging him closer, before he butts his head and horns against Alex’s side. _Now_ it feels awkward, as if Wilbur’s just walked in on a private moment between two friends (it must be a gesture, something special to both of them judging by the soft look in Alex’s eyes afterwards), and he feels heat creeping up his neck and flooding his face. To them, he realises, he’s a danger to their little operation, someone who can jeopardise their plans with a single call now that he knows what they look like.

“Uh... yeah,” Alex says, shifting from leg to leg. He’s a hybrid, Wilbur notices, a duck hybrid specifically, with thick feathers flattening against the sides of his arms as he closes his wings. But he’s also something else — he has to be; the air ripples and changes around him, and Wilbur can’t help but think about the gust of wind that invaded the room and swept him off his feet. “Well it’s not exactly teleporting, it’s more, it’s uh, I can make things go really far and fast in the air.”

It clicks in his head. “Wind spirit?” Wilbur asks.

“I guess,” Alex replies, shrugging. “Is that what you call them? I’m not sure, but... I guess?”

“Huh,” Wilbur says, laying back down. It’s nice — the grass cushion his head and the smell of the forest is rich in his lungs. He likes it here, surrounded by trees and nature, existing alongside the critters residing among the shrubbery. A thought pops into his mind, and he voices it before thinking. “Has that always been your plan?” he asks. “I mean, you steal, and if you get caught you just… fling yourselves out to this clearing?”

No one replies, which gives Wilbur all the answers he needs.

Someone shuffles closer to him. “So… you gonna rat us out?” Schlatt asks, a cautious look in place of his confrontational demeanour.

Wilbur scrunches his nose, his answer decided the moment he walked in on them trying to steal goods. He’d been itching for a little bit of chaos for some time, and past the fear of falling that seized his bones, that was one of the most exhilarating moments of his life. Feeling the glass break around him as Alex flung them out the window alone was enough. “Nah,” he says. “You guys are great.”

“Oh,” Schlatt says. The shuffling stops. “Thank you.” 

Wilbur suspects he’s the kind of person who picks and chooses his moments of gratitude, and suddenly he’s fighting back the urge to smile, jittery at the thought that he made the right choice and also two new allies. Alex flops back down onto the ground, and the three of them simply lay on the ground and breathe the last bits of adrenaline out their system. 

“Alex, right?” Wilbur says, after a long while of silence.

“Just… call me Quackity,” comes the mumbled response, “only Schlatt calls me Alex.”

“Okay.” Wilbur nods, even though they’re all looking at the sky. It’s a nice day out — bright, a little cloudy, perfect for doing nothing at all. “You said you don’t know how to fly properly?”

“Yeah.”

“My dad’s got wings and he- he, uh, he flies sometimes. I could ask him to teach you.” 

He has no idea where this offer came from, but he’s always loved it when Phil takes him flying. Of course, nothing beats having two feet firmly on the ground where there’s no chance of falling to his death (even though he knows Phil would rather die than let him get hurt first), but sometimes it's nice to be up in the air, feeling like he’s untouchable. 

“Uhh.” Wilbur hears the sound of fluttering, as if Quackity’s messing with his feathers. “Sure?”

“Cool.”

A pause.

“What, like, now?” Quackity says.

“I mean, yeah?” Wilbur says. Then backtracks. “I mean, if you guys don’t have anywhere to go right now, or, or uh, in the near future-”

“No, no, uh, we…” Schlatt interjects, voice soft but defensive, “we don’t have, uh, anywhere to go... sometime in the near future. Or- or anywhere to go at all.”

“Oh.” _Oh_.

“Yeah.”

“So is that a yes?”

“Hell yeah dude,” Quackity says, sitting up. He stands, stretches his feathered arms, and extends a hand to Schlatt to help him up. Wilbur follows suit, dusting off dirt and dry leaves from his clothes. “Cool, uh, let’s get going?”

“Yep,” Wilbur says, “if you could just get us to the edge of the forest, I’ll lead the rest of the way there.”

Quackity nods. His feathers puff out into wings and he grabs Wilbur and Schlatt by the arm. Schlatt braces himself, bending his goat legs slightly, and Wilbur thinks that maybe he should do something like that but no, the world turns into blurry lines and he’s already being flung miles a second-

-the world stops, and Wilbur falls over, hands shooting out a second too late to break his fall. He coughs once, twice, and wheezes as he tries choking down air. Above him, Schlatt and Quackity are doing the same thing, but without falling over like an absolute idiot.

After feeling like he won’t collapse into a pile of gangly limbs on the floor for the second time that day, Wilbur takes them back to his house, where Phil’s surprised expression greets him at the door. It quickly softens, though, as soon as Wilbur starts explaining where he found them and what they’re doing him, as soon as Schlatt takes Quackity’s hand and puffs out his chest, as soon as Phil hears ‘ _they have nowhere to go_ ’ and a smile blooms on his face.

“Of course,” Phil says, opening the door wider to let all three of them in. “You boys are welcome to stay for dinner too, if you’d like.” 

And unspoken: _you are welcome to stay forever._

But Wilbur knows — and he suspects that Phil does, too — that neither Schlatt nor Quackity will take up an offer like that. That this is an offer a little too good to be true (though Phil would definitely follow up on his promise and then more) and neither boys are willing to risk the life they already lead.

If Wilbur’s a better person, a better son, a little more selfless than he really is, he’d plead with them to consider staying. To quit their life of crime and live a comfortable life with him, with Techno and Tommy and _Phil_ , and then they’d be the pair’s family, the one they really need. _The one they deserve_. 

But Wilbur is a bad person, a bad son, too selfish for his own good, and these are all excuses he comes up with; when Quackity leaps off the roof with his wings spread wide and Phil is there to help him soar; when Tommy meets Schlatt and they immediately begin scheming; when Wilbur’s voice is stuck in his throat and he’s got the wildest grin on his face. He’s selfish. He’s happy. What more can he ask for?

And besides, the forest is right there. He’s seen it, the way Schlatt’s eyes had lit up in the clearing, the way Quackity’s shoulders were at ease as he laid on the leaves, and Wilbur understands, he does, he’d go insane if he doesn’t take his usual trips to the ocean.

There’s something so viscerally relieving to know that there exists a being much older than him, that it’s been there aeons before he was born, that it’ll be there aeons after he’s gone (or after the universe decides that it’s tired of the darkness), that the waves will keep crashing and the forest will keep growing and the world will keep turning.

And they leave, afterward, after the flying lesson from Phil and a dinner with the family (which, by the way, Wilbur’s absolutely terrified about the fact that Tommy latched onto the pair so quickly, what the _fuck_ does he see in them). But they’ll be back; Quackity had too much fun flying with Phil and Schlatt shared too many scamming secrets with Tommy. 

(So when they return two days later asking if Wilbur would like to come with them on an ‘ _adventure_ ’, he goes without hesitation. They stay for dinner, afterward, and Wilbur ignores the fact that Tommy starts talking about drug cartels the next day.)

* * *

**16:**

“Wil?”

Wilbur pulls his legs closer to his chest, trying to make himself as small as possible. He buries his face in his knees and presses his hands on either side of his head, trying to block out his eyes and ears from the world. 

Outside, someone screams, a terrible sound that sends panic stabbing through his body. It’s not real, _it’s not_ , but the fact that he can hear it at all-

“Go away,” he says, voice hoarse and throat painful. “Fuck off, Tommy.” He’s shaking, he realises, when Tommy stops knocking on his door. His fingers are cold and clammy, and he can’t quite feel his hair around his fingers; he can’t feel it, or anything, and it, he- he’s-

“Okay, okay, I’m gonna get Phil and Techno, please hang on Wil, _please_ -“

Maybe he sobs. Or screams. Or lets out a strangled noise when he stops being able to feel the air in his lungs, the floor under his legs, the fingers on his face, but he knows- he’s breathing and he’s sitting and he’s gripping his hair but none of it registers and he’s tugging at his locks but none of it hurts and _why can’t he fucking feel anything what happened to his body-_

(Sixteen years ago an angel descended upon the city to smite an ancient darkness hidden underneath, sixteen years ago a baby was born stillborn and empty inside, sixteen years ago something that didn’t deserve to be human decided it wanted to live anyway, sixteen years ago the world turned on its head and-

Sixteen years later Wilbur can’t feel his body and thinks this is his retribution, this is where the universe decides it’s done with him-

Sixteen years ago the darkness woke up from its slumber and the first emotion it felt in centuries was _a terrible fear that gripped its form tighter and colder than anything it’s experienced before_ -

Sixteen years later Wilbur wakes up feeling sick to his stomach and stares wide-eyed up at his father, at Phil, at the person who’s supposed to raise and protect him, _at the angel sent down to smite him_ -

_Centuries ago it was nothing but a deep, incorporeal evil festering miles deep under any sign of life, alone and angry and terribly, terrifyingly empty. Half aware of its own existence, feeding off the strife above, passing time day by day and waiting to die_ -

Centuries later a part of Wilbur Soot will never forget not being human.)

“Wilbur?” comes a voice from the other side of the door. 

A chill runs down his spine.

An ugly thing that scrapes the skin of his back and leaves ice in its wake, a pinprick quivering deep in his stomach, extinguishing any pathetic semblance of bravery he’s convinced himself he’s strong enough to muster. This isn’t fear, he’s felt fear before and _this isn’t it_ ; this is staring down the gaping maw of a beast, this is putting a foot out at the edge of a building, this is falling, and freezing, and the graceful arc of an arrow about to hit its bullseye.

Phil knocks the door, and Wilbur can hear him shuffling his feet outside. “Wil, are you okay?” 

But he’s not, _he’s not_ , and a part of him — still hopeful and still human — wants to believe that Phil isn’t that cruel, but the rest of him — deathly terrified — screams:

“I said go _away!_ ”

And maybe it’s the scathing tone of his voice, scratchy and panicked and so unlike his usual passive demeanour; and maybe it’s the memories swirling in his head, the product of two lives clashing against each other like a violent car crash from which only one can come out on top; and maybe it’s the way a sob tears out his throat, way too young and way too lonely — but Phil stops. 

Wilbur hears a sigh, and can imagine the pained look on Phil’s face, knows that his father wants to insist. 

But he stops, and Wilbur’s grateful for that.

After a few agonising seconds of pure silence in which Wilbur’s sure that his door is about to get blasted open, he hears another knock. Too soft to be Tommy’s demanding thumps, too firm to be Phil’s hesitant tapping, Technoblade raps the door with his knuckle and says in a low voice, far softer than what Wilbur’s used to, “Wilbur, can I come in?”

Instead of answering, Wilbur shuffles closer to a corner and clamps his mouth shut in an attempt to stifle his crying. 

“I’m gonna take that as a ‘yes’, alright?” Techno says slowly, pronouncing every syllable clearly. “I’m gonna come in alone, and if you want me to leave at any time, tell me and I’ll do it immediately.” A pause. “I’m openin’ the door now, okay?”

Wilbur doesn’t respond, and a beat later the door creaks open and he hears a shush from the other side — most likely Phil or Techno shutting Tommy up — before he hears the familiar tapping of hoofed feet against his floor.

Techno crouches in front of him, keeping a comfortable distance away, making sure Wilbur has enough space to scurry away if need be. It makes him feel like a rabid animal, on the edge of snapping and lashing out violently, and in a sense, he is. For a few moments, that’s all they do: sit, and breathe, and exist in the same space. 

“Can I touch you?” Techno asks, breaking the silence between them.

Wilbur still doesn’t say anything, doesn’t make a noise aside from the sobs wrecking his body.

It’s not a no; he’d love to be touched, to feel something aside from the icy fear clawing painfully at the base of his lungs, starving him of air. 

It’s not a no, and his brother takes that as a yes, because a moment later he feels Techno’s hands cupping his own, gently untangling his hair from his fingers and prying his hands away from where they were clawed around his ears. Wilbur forces his muscles to relax, and Techno guides them towards him, holding them above his knees between them.

Technoblade doesn’t deal in sentimental words. He doesn’t say ‘ _I love you_ ’ or ‘ _I’m proud of you_ ’ or ‘ _I enjoyed spending time with you_ ’. He banters and he quips and he throws out the occasional one-liner that lives rent-free in Wilbur’s head for days afterwards, but Wilbur can count on one hand the number of times he’s heard Techno say a compliment and mean it. 

Fortunately for Techno, Wilbur knows his older brother like the back of his own hand. They’re brothers, two years apart, bound by everything but blood. Wilbur knows all the people he’s been; the young piglin hybrid picked fresh from the Nether, angry at the world that abandoned him; the hunter apprentice clawing his way up the ranks, loyal only to his deity and family and always looking for fights; the legendary Technoblade, an unstoppable force, something bright and fierce and dangerous in the eyes of all but the people who love him. 

Wilbur knows him, knows how to navigate him easily — sometimes a lot easier than he knows how to navigate himself.

And fortunately for Wilbur, Techno knows him, too.

Technoblade doesn’t deal in sentimental words. Instead, he takes Wilbur out on car rides along the coastline and lets him roll down the passenger window to let the salty air in. He distracts Tommy with a promise to teach him how to fight when he notices Wilbur’s about to snap at their youngest for being too pushy. He leaves food outside Wilbur’s door when he’s too caught up lamenting about his existence to go down for dinner.

And here, now, he intertwines their fingers and leans in, pressing Wilbur’s hands to his lips, his tusks. A gesture passed down to him from the piglin race; shared among close friends, lovers, and most importantly _family_. A sign of solidarity, of sympathy, an unspoken message of protectiveness, admiration, and respect of the highest, most intimate level.

Wilbur feels it all. The way Techno’s rough fingers slides between his own. The gentle tug of his arms. Techno’s tusks — and subsequently his metal braces — pressing into his skin. And Techno’s closing his eyes, hot breaths against his fingers, and Wilbur _feels_ it, feels all these sensations trickling back into his nerves. 

He chokes out a sob, and clenches his brother’s hands. A response to the gesture — accepted, and requited.

Techno opens his eyes — a deep blue, the colour of the sea at night, a subtle rejection of his fiery Nether roots — and meets Wilbur’s dark gaze. He breaks the gesture and gives Wilbur a lopsided smile, lips curling awkwardly around his tusks. Wilbur laughs, a wet bark that hurts his chest, but at least he can feel his chest hurting, and it’s enough to make him wrench his hands out of Techno’s hold and launch himself forward, tackling his brother with a hug.

They hit the floor with a thud, and Wilbur doesn’t feel sorry at all that Techno takes the brunt of the impact because he’s laughing, and Techno’s laughing, too, they’re both laughing, and Wilbur thinks, _this is it_ , there’s no sound more beautiful to his ears than the messy tones of two brothers wrapped together in a desperate hug.

“I take it that you’re better now?” Techno jokes after they’ve stopped rolling and wrestling on Wilbur’s rug and gathering dust on their clothes. 

Wilbur buries his head in his brother’s shoulder and nods furiously, trying his best to contain the smile on his face (which feels a little awkward as he’s a couple inches taller but that doesn’t really matter because neither of them actually care at the moment).

“Can Tommy and Phil come in now?”

Wilbur hesitates. That part of him won’t ever let him go. He’s always going to be afraid, always going to freeze when Phil raises his voice, always going to be cautious when Tommy tries to snoop in his business, always going to flinch away when Techno exorcises a dark spirit on a hunt. 

But the hopeful, the human part of him knows — and _he_ knows, too — that his family would never hurt him, no matter what. 

He remembers how Phil would stop shouting as soon as he saw the look in Wilbur’s eyes, how Tommy caught on to his discomfort and backed away immediately, how Techno made him leave the room when he’s about to banish a spirit from its host. 

He remembers the feel of Techno’s lips against his fingers, and he nods.

Techno chuckles and squeezes him breathless for a second. He untangles himself from Wilbur and stands upright, offering a hand for Wilbur to take. “Alright, but I gotta warn you that Tommy’s not gonna shut up today.” Wilbur doesn’t miss how Techno rolls his eyes. “Something about that Tubbo kid, so. Just a heads up.”

“When _doesn’t_ he bitch about Tubbo, really,” Wilbur says, and pride blooms in his chest when Techno snickers.

Techno calls out for Phil and Tommy, and Wilbur’s door immediately bursts open with a flurry of gremlin child and worried father. Tommy dives straight to tackle-hug Wilbur (this is karma, _this is so much fucking karma_ ), and Wilbur doesn’t flinch at the sight of Phil’s wings, so he counts that as a win.

“Big man, big man dubs, big dubs, oh Primes man I was so worried about you please don’t ever tell me to fuck off again-“

“Fuck off, dickhead.”

“-I’m sorry if I did anything wrong- okay now that’s just unwarranted and rude big man, is that how you repay my kindness, because if it is then that’s just fucked up, I hope you’re fine now or, or at least as fine as you can be or something, I don’t know how this shit works, do you need a distraction, I heard that talking can be a good distraction so anyway have you heard about Tubbo-“

“Tommy-“

“-he asked me to be his patron deity, dude can you believe that, I think it’s my turn to cry like a bitch except I never cry, I’m way too tough to cry like a bitch, wait, I’m not saying that you were a bitch, okay sometimes you are but not now, fuck, I’m sorry, oh Primes-“

“Tommy!” Wilbur says firmly, which effectively shuts him up. “I’m fine, big man. You don’t gotta worry about me, yeah?” 

Almost by instinct, he twirls a lock of Tommy’s hair around a finger. In return, Tommy headbutts him on his chest, and Wilbur wheezes at the impact of his tiny red horns. But instead of getting annoyed, he feels his heart melt yet again; Tommy picked that gesture up from Schlatt, which Wilbur has learnt means relief, and a wish for comfort, a way for satyrs to show each other that they care. 

(And later, he spends a few hours alone with Phil, squished up against each other as they talk about everything and nothing at all. Phil wraps a large wing around Wilbur’s lanky figure. He shudders from the feel of feathers brushing against his arm, his neck, the back of his head, half-tempted to pull away and half-tempted to giggle from the ticklish feeling. Another gesture; these days he’ll start to lose track of which gesture means what, but this one specifically he’ll never forget. 

Angels are an exclusive race. No one knows how they work, why they exist, why they do the things they do and smite the creatures they smite. But Phil has always been an open person, and when Wilbur asks what the gesture means, his father doesn’t hesitate to say _unconditional love_.)

* * *

**19:**

There is a darkness underneath the city.

_There is a darkness underneath the city, and Wilbur can feel it like a strained nerve, or a lit fuse, or a falling piece of glass, like it was only a matter of time before it- before_ he _shatters and takes everyone down with him. Like he’s been standing on the tip of a needle for nineteen years, and he’s been able to ignore the way his feet were bleeding his whole life, brush it off without a second thought. But everyone’s got to give at one point, and it’s about time he breaks and he breaks as horrifically and beautifully too._

_Like he’s reaching the end of the line._

_Like he’s finally, completely, desperately out of time._

_Like there’s no way out and there hasn’t been a way out for as long as he can remember and-_

_it’s_

_time_

_to_

_go._

Here’s how everything goes wrong. 

Wilbur wakes up one night with a strange sense of dread pooling deep in his stomach. He sits up, looks around his dark room and at the moonlight shifting on his floor. He reaches for his phone to check the time — 3 AM sharp — and rubs his eyes with his palms. Something feels wrong, feels off — as if someone’s shifted the universe three inches to the left, as if all the colour’s been sucked out the universe, as if he woke up to an empty city and hasn’t realised it yet — and he knows he won’t be able to go back to sleep tonight.

(It takes him too long to realise what’s wrong: the ghosts have gone silent.)

He hears voices downstairs and drags himself out of bed to check it out. As soon as he steps into the hallway, he’s face-to-face with Tommy, who’s trying to do the exact same thing he is from the room across his own. They share the same look of guilt before Wilbur raises a finger to his lips and Tommy nods in agreement. Wilbur takes a step out his door, the sound of his footsteps immediately muffled by a wave of Tommy’s hand and a whiff of magic in the air, and the pair make their way to the top of the stairs where they can listen in.

(Thinking back, he should have just gone to bed. It would’ve made things a whole lot easier, a lot less painful.)

Phil and Techno talk downstairs, their voices muffled all the way from the kitchen. Wilbur nods at Tommy, and his younger brother takes his hand, claws digging slightly into Wilbur’s skin, a spark of electricity zapping his skin at the point of contact. The world turns a little sharper, a little brighter, and Wilbur can hear the conversation going on downstairs clear as day.

“-I gotta warn you Techno, this isn’t something you’ve had to deal with before,” he hears Phil say in a soft voice, so low that even with Tommy’s enhanced hearing he can barely make out the words. “You _really_ don’t have to be involved in this.”

“I know, Phil,” Techno answers, voice as monotonous as ever. But Wilbur doesn’t miss the graveness in his tone, the lack of his usual lighthearted indifference. 

“And, and if we- _when_ we find it, we’ll have to prepare for the worst,” Phil says. “It’s been hiding for a long time and it’s _not_ going to give up without a fight.”

“I know.”

“It’s- it’s going to hurt so many people, Techno, who knows what it’s been doing all this time? I’ve had nineteen years to… oh Primes, I should’ve been more careful.”

_Nineteen years_.

Wilbur’s heart sinks in his chest. 

A terrible shiver trickles slowly down his spine, freezing every inch of skin and every bump of his backbone that it touches. The night feels just a little bit colder, the air a little stiffer around his skin, and he shoots a hand out to grip the railing, suddenly unsure of the strength of his own legs. Tommy looks at him from the corner of his eyes, worried. Wilbur can’t meet his gaze, so instead he fixes his eyes on the floor and swallows a painful lump down in his throat.

(It takes nineteen years to build a family and only a few words to tear it all apart.)

“I know,” Techno says. A long pause, a long bout of silence, then, “Tommy. Wilbur. I know you’re listening.” Wilbur jolts so hard he thinks he might’ve twisted a nerve somewhere. “You’re not the only one with sharp ears.”

“Ah, shit, Tommy? Wil?” Phil says, a little louder. Wilbur hears a long sigh, as if his father’s trying to pull himself back together. “Come on down, boys, it’s fine, I didn’t expect you two to be awake, but… I think you both need to know about this.”

Tommy shoots a look at him, then lifts the silencing charm on both of them. He starts his way down the stairs, his tail bouncing tautly behind him. Wilbur takes a deep breath, clenching and unclenching his fists for a moment before he follows his brother downstairs, dreading what might await him at the bottom.

(In hindsight, he really should’ve just turned tail and fucked right off. Returned to his bedroom, sprinted out the front door, jumped out the window, anything, _anything_ , but he’s too much of a coward to even consider leaving his family behind.)

“What’s going on?” Tommy asks as soon as Wilbur enters the kitchen with his hands shoved deep into his pockets in a feeble attempt to keep himself from shaking.

He looks around. At Phil sitting with his head in his hands at their dinner table. At Techno leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed. At Tommy standing awkwardly in the middle of the room wearing a worried expression. And himself, hovering nervously by the doorway, half-shrouded by the shadows cast by the one light bulb shining above them.

It feels like he’s come home from school with a shitty score on his math exam, or they’ve received a call telling them that Tommy tried to vandalise something, or Techno’s gotten into a fight with some run-of-the-mill criminals. Like all of this is normal, like they’ve just disappointed their father with some mundane mistake, like Wilbur isn’t a mere human living under the same roof as three of the most powerful beings in the whole city.

(And that’s his first mistake, isn’t it? Trying to convince himself he’s human in the first place.)

“Boys,” Phil starts, looking up at them. He’s missing his smile, Wilbur realises distantly; even in the harshest of moments Phil would always have a lilt to his lips, an air of pleasantry, of detachment, that comes with being an untouchable being of cosmic proportions. “I’ve found the thing I was sent down to smite.”

It’s common knowledge within the family that nineteen years ago, Phil descended upon the city for one purpose and one purpose only: to destroy the ancient darkness that’s been lurking underneath it like a time bomb, growing stronger and more malevolent by the day until it implodes and takes the Earth down with it. It’s also common knowledge that Phil failed, that he lost its trace and couldn’t go home without finishing his task, that he didn’t mind because he found that he liked being human too much, that he loved his family too much.

But he never stopped looking. Never stopped scanning the city, never stopped glancing at every dark corner, never stopped looking into every one of Techno’s hunts for signs of the void he’s supposed to smite. 

“ _It’s unapologetically evil, and you can’t compromise with it no matter what,_ ” he would always tell them, “ _you boys have to be careful about messing with dark creatures, it might lash out and cause some real damage_.” And his eyebrows would always furrow, the edges of his lips would always turn down. “ _Or worse, it might come back and decide that it’s time to wipe out everything_.”

(The unfortunate reality is that Wilbur only ever wanted to live, to be human.)

“Yeah?” Tommy asks, shifting from foot to foot. “Well… why haven’t you killed it yet then? What’s with all the fuss?”

Phil sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose. “Okay, yeah, I found it but I couldn’t pin it down exactly,” he says. “I’ve come across dark traces that I’ve identified to be left behind by the thing — it’s been running all around the city this whole time but recently, it’s gotten too sloppy with… covering its tracks.” 

Wilbur’s blood runs cold in his veins. He hasn’t done anything, he swears, he hasn’t hurt anyone or started a riot or gotten into a fight or anything. He’s just- it’s only ever been a matter of time before Phil learns to identify all the traces he can’t wipe out ( _the thrumming under his skin, the voices in his ears, the way his lips curl up as chaos breaks all around him_ ), he’s just out of time. 

“It’s not enough for me to pinpoint its location exactly, but- but I’ve narrowed down all the possibilities and... here’s the thing.” Phil pauses, looks between them, and Wilbur _swears_ his gaze lingered on him. Phil turns his eyes down once more, crossing his hands tightly. “It’s latched itself onto one of us.”

“What, what does that mean?” Tommy asks, uncharacteristically nervous.

“What Phil’s sayin’,” Techno cuts in, “is that one of us has been possessed by the darkness. We’ve narrowed it down to a specific set of people, specifically, us-“ he gestures between the four of them, “and our friends. It could be anyone.”

He gestures at Tommy. “It could be Tubbo or his siblings.”

Techno clenches his fists. “It could be Dream or his friends.”

He looks at Wilbur. Pauses for a second too long. Enough to squeeze all the air out of Wilbur’s lungs. “It could be Schlatt or Quackity.”

“It could be any one of us too,” Wilbur feels his lips move, breathless and quivering.

Phil nods grimly at him, lips pursed in a way Wilbur has never seen him do. “It could be anyone, but…I think I’d notice if a malevolent creature took over any one of my sons, right?” 

He smiles. It’s an empty expression. Wilbur doesn’t know how to feel about any of this; whether he should be more scared, more worried, more terrified of death than he really is; whether he’s putting too much faith into Phil’s _unconditional love;_ whether he trusts his family enough to look past his nature.

(He really, _really_ should’ve booked it right then and there. It wouldn’t have been too late.)

“Look, we’ve got to act quickly before it realises we’ve caught on, so tomorrow we’ll gather everyone and find the darkness, yeah? You don’t have to look so tense — there really is nothing to be worried about.”

( _Liar_.)

Phil stands up from his seat and glances at the clock on the wall. “Why don’t you three go get some rest? I’ll do all the prep and contact everyone, yeah?”

Techno pushes himself off the kitchen counter and marches upstairs without so much as a 'goodbye'. His footsteps are heavy on the stairs, and he all but slams the door to his room.

“It can’t be Tubbo,” Tommy protests immediately after the house grows silent again. “I would know. It can’t be him.” A clawed hand curls around the necklace he hasn't taken off since he made the hunter's pact with his best friend, its pendant glowing a striking cyan the same colour as his eyes — the same colour as Tubbo’s. Somewhere out there, Tubbo should feel a warmth emanating from the twin gem he's hung around his wrist.

“We can’t know for sure until we’ve tested and cleared him, Tommy,” Phil says kindly, reaching up to ruffle Tommy’s blond hair, fingers slipping around the red horns growing over his head. “We _have_ to be careful and thorough, okay? For what it's worth, I’m sure you know him enough to tell, but… we can’t afford any slip-ups.”

Tommy bats away Phil’s hand. “Whatever,” he says, but he’s fighting back an expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace. Tommy scurries upstairs, his footsteps a silent contrast to Techno’s, and his bedroom door barely makes a sound when he closes it.

Phil sighs. Wilbur looks at him, still frozen at the doorway to their kitchen. It’s just the two of them now. It’s just them now — two mortal enemies, the soft ticking of the clock on the wall, and a silent house edging on the cliff of ruin. 

“You alright Wil?” Phil asks, smiling kindly at him. “I know it’s a lot to take in. Hell, mate, I can hardly believe it — I’ve finally found the thing I’ve been hunting all these years-”

“Are you going to kill them?” Wilbur interrupts, his voice timid, barely a whisper that Phil catches anyway.

“The person…?”

“Yeah.”

“Mate- Wil, no, of course I won’t,” Phil says. “No, it’s all out of their control. I won’t hurt a hair on their head, they haven’t done anything to… they don’t deserve it.”

(‘And _I_ do?’ a part of him screams — the same part that makes his hands shake in his pockets — but it’s quickly clamped down by the rest of him, the one that still has hope.)

“So what’re you going to do?”

“I’ll… I’ll test them, yeah? And if I find it in them, I’ll just… we’ll expel the spirit and kill it. Really, I won’t hurt its vessel. You have nothing to worry about.”

“And-“ his voice breaks, breath hitching in his throat, “and what if that doesn’t work?”

A pause.

Phil opens his mouth to answer. Then closes it. Rubs his eyes, the grey bags under them mirrored on Wilbur’s own face. “It’ll work, Wil. And if it still refuses to leave the body, I’ll smite it _in_ the vessel and then expel its remains. It’ll be… more… risky, but as long as I can keep the person tethered to life, everything should go smoothly.”

(And left unasked: _What if it just wanted to live? What if I just wanted to be human?_ )

“Go to bed, Wil,” Phil says, “I’ll have everything under control, really. Things will be alright by tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Wilbur echoes, swallowing a lump in his throat, distantly feeling his legs take him back to his room. He doesn’t go back to sleep that night.

(He can’t just leave them like that — they’re his family. They have to understand, _they have to_. If they love him as much as they claim to, they’ll listen to him, they’ll look past his nature, they’ll let him live. He’s their son, their brother, part of their family, they can’t just let that go.

Can they?

_Will they_?)

_Tomorrow_ comes too quickly.

Wilbur doesn’t even realise it’s morning until Tommy pounds on his door and yells at him to get up. He doesn’t even notice the sunlight coming in through the windows. 

He sighs. Blinks the shock out of his heavy eyelids and does his daily reality check.

He’s stretched out on the bed, his sheets bunched up on his chest and tangled between his legs as a result of restless tossing and turning. He’s got an arm draped over a pillow and an arm hanging out the side of the bed, barely grazing the floor. He sucks in a quick breath, sneezes as his nose stings at the cold, feeling it wreck his whole body in a violent jerk. 

He feels alive, which is funny, because he dies today.

He knows what’s coming, and laying uselessly in his bedroom won’t do anyone any good. Outside, he hears Tommy yelling and Techno complaining and Phil trying to diffuse the usual morning scramble but soon giving in to the little whirlwind of chaos that is his youngest son. Wilbur can barely muster up the energy to sit up on his bed, let alone join in and make fun of Tommy like he’d usually do.

He dies today.

(He _won’t._ )

Here’s how everything goes wrong.

Phil stretches his wings outside their front door and takes off to get some last-minute prep ready. Techno’s supposed to take his two brothers by car. Tommy complains about being able to teleport. Wilbur walks like a man on death row, feeling all empty inside.

They pull up to the abandoned warehouse by Niki’s house, where she and her three siblings are waiting. She greets Wilbur with a wave, which he returns weakly. Tommy immediately pulls Tubbo aside.

There is the sound of a harsh landing on the roof and unwarranted cursing. Schlatt and Quackity walk in butting heads with each other. The two of them greet everyone, and Schlatt tries to strike up a conversation with Wilbur, but it goes nowhere, not when the nerves are getting the better of him.

Phil walks in, followed by Dream and his two friends. The green bastard throws himself at Techno. George and Sapnap find their way to Niki, her brother Eret, and the furry fuck.

Wilbur stands alone, burying his chin in the coat he’s wearing, his arms crossed and locked together. 

It’s fitting, he thinks, though he’s not thinking a lot. He’s not thinking about his upcoming execution. He’s not thinking about his family, about his friends, about the life that’s about to be ripped away from him.

Phil catches all their attention and briefs them on their situation. He waits out their cries of fear and confusion before explaining what exactly will happen, and how he’s not going to let anyone die no matter what. 

He puts them in a line with Techno at one end and Wilbur on the other. Beside him, Tommy won’t fucking stop talking to Tubbo. Someone makes a snide remark about Tommy and everyone else laughs. Wilbur is trying very hard not to cry.

Phil starts with Techno. He puts his hands on either side of Techno’s head and looks deep into Techno’s eyes. His eyes start glowing a blinding yellow, almost like looking into the headlamp of a car, but instead of LED’s it’s the light of heaven itself. Wilbur kicks himself for trying to come up with jokes. After a moment, nothing happens, and Phil’s eyes return to their normal colour. Techno passes the test and Phil sighs in relief.

Phil moves on to Dream, who jokes about the whole situation. He laughs awkwardly, but no one else does, and Techno tells him not to be weird. Dream passes the test. Techno pulls him aside to talk shit again.

Phil moves on. George and Sapnap both pass the test, and they high-five each other afterward despite the weight of the situation at hand. 

Phil moves on. Schlatt and Quackity are both fine too. Quackity yells out something in Spanish and Schlatt elbows him.

Phil moves on. Fundy and Eret pass the test. They walk away quickly, sombrely, wordlessly.

Phil moves on. Nothing happens with Niki too. She shoots Wilbur a glance, her eyes wide.

Phil moves on. Tubbo clenches Tommy’s hand in his. He passes the test.

Phil moves on. Tommy passes. 

Phil falters.

Wilbur takes a step back.

The warehouse falls silent.

Here’s how everything goes wrong.

“Wil,” Phil says, his face frozen in an unreadable expression. 

Everyone’s looking at him now, and it feels less like an execution and more like he’s standing on stage giving a big speech, or he’s performing in front of a big crowd, or he’s finished an exam first and he’s walking up to turn the paper in while his classmates stare at him. 

“Wil,” his father starts again, “come here.”

Phil extends a hand. Wilbur looks at it, looks up at his father, and takes another step back. 

“Wilbur.” Phil’s expression hardens, the lines on his face smoothed over by grim determination. He never calls him ‘Wilbur’. “Come here. Let me read your soul.”

Behind him, Techno tightens his grip around the hunter’s knife on his belt. Tubbo pulls Tommy away from him, fear and realisation dawning on the young hunter’s eyes. 

And Tommy, too smart and too ready to believe the best in people, wrenches himself away from Tubbo and interjects, “Wait- no, no way it’s Wilbur, Phil, Phil wait, maybe you made a mistake somewhere, or, or-“

“Wilbur?”

“Oh Primes-“

“Wil-“

“You’re not telling me, no way-“

“Soot… is it really…?”

“No, no, it’s not- Wilbur, Wil please, please, tell them it’s not you,” Tommy keeps going, keeps arguing, keeps talking over everyone else in a useless attempt to deny the truth. He stumbles forward and grabs Wilbur by the coat, clenching the fabric in his clawed hands. Eyes desperate and so painfully hopeful. “Wil, tell them, _tell them_ , man, please-“

“Tommy, get away from him-“

“No, Phil- Phil, look, it can’t be him, you _know_ him, it’s not- please-“

“I said, _get away from it_ ,” Phil snaps, eyes a burning yellow, and when Tubbo yanks him away again, Tommy doesn’t try to fight back, instead opting to look at Wilbur with pure worry written all over his face. 

(Wilbur’s heart swells with a bright feeling; he swears in that moment that he can’t love his brother more than he already does. Tommy, who never gives up no matter what, who looks at him and sees a brother first and a monster second.)

Phil turns back on him. Wilbur keeps his gaze fixed on the floor, too scared (too _ashamed_ ) to meet anyone’s eyes. His hands hang uselessly by his side, fiddling with the hem of his shirt, tearing the fabric at places and chalking it up to nerves. 

“Wilbur,” Phil tries again, but he’s no longer speaking as a father. His face is scarily blank, righteous and _holy_ anger evident in the way his lips curl, his eyes burn, his voice echoes with a hidden chorus only the two of them can truly hear. “Take a step forward. Now.”

Wilbur swallows. Opens his mouth. A moment of bravery grants him a look up, and he meets Phil’s eyes. Something in him lights up like a fuse, like the ticking of a clock, like he’s not ready to go yet despite all his talk of accepting death. He forces his voice out, says, “ _Please_ -“

Phil jerks forward, grabs him by the sides of his head, and forces their eyes to meet. 

It’s like looking into the flames of a house-fire scorching down the place around him. Like staring too long and too close to the sun and paying the consequences when it stares back at you. Like someone’s setting fire to his chest and he’s trying to suck in air but there’s nothing to breathe and he doubles over with his hands coming up to clench around the fingers over his ears and something’s clawed its way in and something’s crawling through his veins and his vision flickers but his eyes are wide open and staring straight into his father’s eyes-

Phil releases him and Wilbur falls onto the floor on his knees, his legs too weak to support him properly. 

“It’s him,” he hears Phil says, “do it,” and then harsh footsteps, and Wilbur barely has any time to catch his breath before someone grabs him by the scruff of his neck and drags him up, and away, and slams him into a wall, drawing a cry out of him as he struggles to get away-

Technoblade pins him in place, glaring directly into his eyes, conflicted hatred in his deep blue irises. A storm, Wilbur thinks, a terrible disaster threatening to rock his ship and swallow him into its murky depths. Phil is all fire and heat but Techno’s gaze pulls him under, fills his lungs with the ghost of saltwater and taints his fond memories of the sea.

“Got it!” comes Dream’s voice as he steps up holding a small leather-bound book. He flips it open to a specific page and nods at Techno.

Wilbur’s eyes widen, and a ‘ _Wait_ ’ is halfway out his mouth when Dream reads the first word of the exorcism and his breath is taken away again.

The world spins. His vision blacks. Maybe this is it, but he knows the universe isn’t kind to creatures like him. They’re trying to expel a foreign spirit, something that the body, too, is trying to reject, but this body doesn’t belong to anyone else, _it’s his_ , he’s the only one in it, there was never a human soul to begin with and he’s made his peace with being Wilbur Soot and he can’t go anywhere-

He looks up and meets Niki’s eye by chance. Her hands fly up to stifle her gasp. 

A cold realisation descends on him: he’s not going anywhere. They’re going to see the person they’re trying to save die in front of them and they’ll realise their mistake and he can’t let that happen to them, _he can’t do that to them_ -

He can’t go anywhere. So instead it tears him apart.

He falls. Curls up into a ball. Thrashes and tries to escape from the words trying to rip into him. It feels like a hook has latched onto his heart and is trying to yank him out the bars of a cage he’s too big to fit through, like someone’s gone and made him forget how to breathe and he’s clawing at his throat, like he’s trying to scream but all that comes out is a terrified whimper, _like something crawled in and scooped a part of him out and he’s left as a husk of a husk of a husk of a-_

Wilbur bites his tongue as his back arches, watching the world blur and fade and pressing his face onto the cold floor. It’s not painful, which is something that should probably concern him; he’s gotten paper-cuts that hurt worse than being exorcised from his own body. Maybe he’s lost the ability to feel pain and he’s about to die and this isn’t such a bad way to go, surrounded by the people ~~he loved~~ ~~loves~~ ~~who used to care about him~~ ~~who still do~~ he calls family-

“Stop it!” Tommy screams, barrelling into Dream and ending the exorcism then and there. 

The feeling stops abruptly. The pressure all over his body lifts and the room stops blurring into fuzzy shapes. Wilbur chokes, and coughs, and releases his grip around his neck. He inhales deeply once, twice, blinking his eyes and trying even harder not to cry.

“Stop it, Dream- please, I really don’t think it’s him.” 

“Tommy, _it’s_ hurting Wilbur, we can’t just let it go like that-“

“You said it yourself, Phil, Phil please, you would’ve noticed it if he acted any differently-“

“But if it saves him…”

“No, no, it’s killing him, _can’t you see what you’re doing_ -“

Their voices start blending together into an amalgamation of words, pleas thrown into the air that are meaningless at the face of someone hell-bent on fulfilling his heavenly duty. Wilbur clenches his fists as he stares off into nothing, still laying weak and breathless on the floor. His vision blurs with tears and his mouth hangs open trying to gasp in breaths that escape him. 

He feels empty inside. Something sits uncomfortably in his stomach, a sudden pit pooling where his gut should be, an ugly, writhing loss that almost feels like grief if grief is this ravenous beast gnawing mercilessly at his insides. A hole, he thinks distantly, ever-expanding, ever-painful, a scathing hunger that was once a measly itch he could easily bat away but has now evolved, expanded, grown like a tumour and is eating at him. 

Wilbur curls into himself, wrapping his arms around his abdomen where the pit hurts the most. The hunger sinks in deeper, hollower, sapping the life out of him and demanding more, _more_. 

Like the exorcism failed to claw him out of his body and instead raked out something vital, twisted something deep in him into an open wound he can’t quite close. He feels it etched into him, an ache that settles into his bones, and he doesn’t quite hate himself for whimpering at the pain.

(There is a darkness underneath the city.

_There is a darkness underneath the city, and Wilbur feels it take ahold inside of him, lining the walls of the void taking shape in his gut. Trying to close the wound, trying to worm its way under his skin, trying to fill his lungs with a bitter taste he can’t escape anymore._

There is a darkness underneath him.

_There is a darkness underneath him, and Wilbur feels it reaching out to him like a father would, if a father loved him enough to spare him. So blame him if he, desperate to soothe the pain in his gut, reaches back if only to find some solace among the deep-seated churning._

There is a darkness inside him.

_There is a darkness inside him, and Wilbur feels it- no, _him_ , stretching into his fingertips, filling every nook and cranny of his body, a vile sort of anger he still shies away from. He is the darkness, the darkness is him, he’s been running from the truth for far too long and now that it’s staring at him dead in the eyes, he has no choice but to embrace it like a wayward child finally coming home._)

“Wilbur-“

Something lifts him up by the shoulders, and his back hits the wall again. A hand grips his chin, keeping his head from lolling down.

“Wilbur, look at me.”

His eyes lay dead on the floor — he can’t be bothered to focus when he’s trying to work himself through one breath at a time, trying to glue himself together crumbling piece by crumbling piece. 

“Wilbur.”

The hand forces his chin up, tearing his gaze towards a pair of glowing yellow eyes, ones that he instinctively tries to flinch and back away from. But there’s no way out, nothing behind him to step back towards, and instead he makes a strangled noise at the back of his throat. Something that sounds like the horrible mix of threatening and scared, a cornered animal finally ready to lash out.

The eyes burn into him again. Heat sears into his eye sockets, into his head, down his trachea and singeing the walls of his lungs. Burning through his chest until he’s certain he’s about to burst from all the heat and pressure. A flare lit at the centre of the dark void like a flame trying to cauterise the wound, trying to seal the gap, trying to fix what has been broken but only managing to leave the taste of smoke on his tongue.

Phil blinks, the light in his eyes dimming as he pulls away, never breaking the deep gaze. The heat abruptly leaves Wilbur’s body, and cold takes over, as if he’s been drenched after a house fire and left outside to freeze. He coughs out the dull ashy tang out his mouth and while he’s at it, heaves in big lungfuls of fresh, fresh air.

“Wilbur...?”

Something gathers between his fingers — like he’s bunched up solid air in his fists, light and malleable and constantly shifting against his skin. He feels it thick in the air, buzzing to life as he breathes, and breathes, and scrapes together whatever energy in his body he has left. It calls to him, like the shore waiting for the tide to return, always there, always patient, always willing to welcome him back home.

“Get away from me,” he rasps, face twisting into a painful expression. 

Phil refuses to budge, his expression something that borders conflicted between a primal hatred and genuine confusion. “Wait, but I don’t… I don’t understand...”

“I said,” he snaps, “get _away from me_!”

Wilbur closes his fists and the air explodes with energy, a dark force taking ahold of the room and curling around its inhabitants, throwing them far away from him. He hears the sound of bodies being flung into walls, onto the floor, the gasps of his friends and a scream at one point. 

He’s standing, righting himself against the wall with one hand extended in front of him. He sees it now: shadows shifting along the floor, the walls, the dark silhouettes of grotesque claws wrapped around his friends’ bodies, holding them in a tight choke as they squirm against his grip.

It’s too easy, ~~too fun~~ , and a part of him _sings_ in delight as he realises he’s in control, he’s standing over them as the power imbalance has tipped; they’re the cornered animals now and he’s got their lives hung from his fingers like puppets bound by string. A wet bark of laughter tears itself out of his mouth, morbidly victorious in the way he’s just destroyed a lifetime of carefully-built relationships in the literal wave of a hand. 

They’re scared of him.

The thought of it sends a tingling feeling tap-tapping down his back. 

Fear, he thinks, is looking at Schlatt and Niki and Tubbo and Techno _and Tommy_ ~~and Phil~~ and at the horrified looks they send his way.

Fear, he thinks, is the way he falters as Schlatt drops any bravado he once had; the way his expression falls as Niki cries into her hands; the way he starts shaking as Tubbo reaches for his knife; the way he loosens the death grip as Techno stares at him, frozen in shock; the way he feels tear tracks down his own cheeks as Tommy thrashes and yells and _won’t fucking give up on him_.

~~Fear, a part of him muses, is the way Phil breaks free easily of his restraints and a blade materialises in his hand, burning and glowing and shifting in the light it emanates.~~

( _Fear leaves a sweet aftertaste, cool against his tongue, like he’s just drunk a late-night smoothie after a night of banishing tricksters_ ~~ _with his father_~~ _ ~~.~~ It swirls around in the air, settles on him like a second skin, and for a second the gnawing pit in his stomach stops ravaging him._)

“Wilbur,” Phil says, stern, either a father talking down to his son or a soldier holding a gun to his enemy’s head. At this point they’re one and the same. “Let them go.”

He swallows, feeling his spit drag painfully down his throat. His lip twitches as he fights with himself. He so badly wants to challenge Phil, let him go through with the promise at the tip of his blade, let him finish what he started, ~~let him watch the life drain out of his own son’s eyes.~~

But he relents, lowering his hand and letting his friends go. The air buzzes again, tugging on his fingers, and he stamps it down violently with a clench of his jaw. He’s not going to- he _can’t_ give himself completely into that part of him, not when he’s spent so long rejecting it, no matter how tempting it feels.

( _Despite everything, he'd still like to convince himself he's human._ )

“Wil,” Niki speaks up, eyes wide and full of terror. Either she’s too stupid or too brave or… ~~Wilbur doesn’t want to think about the third alternative.~~ “ _No,_ no, you’re not Wilbur-“ 

“Aren’t I?” he asks.

Once the high of control has worn off, all he’s left with is a dull emptiness that washes over him and leaves him feeling all hollow inside. There’s still a blade being pointed at him, a heavenly weapon that he knows was forged for this very reason. The need to live doesn’t even register until he’s eyeing the doorway and his legs are itching to _move_.

“Because last I checked I was the only one in here,” he spits with a venom that burns hot on his tongue, locking away the guilt beginning to bloom in his chest. And maybe he’s insane, or a masochist, or just someone who’s given up any hope of rekindling his broken life, because he continues, half truths spilling out his lips uncontrollably, “Last I checked, _Wilbur_ died a long, _long_ time ago.” 

He gives them his best smile, the one that crinkles his eyes and shows all his pearly teeth. ~~He ignores the way Techno flinches.~~ It doesn’t have the effect he wants it to because he’s fucking crying, and he wipes the wetness on his cheeks with a sleeve, trying and failing to stop the tears from falling. 

“And last I checked,” he says, voice cracking, _so much for a dramatic grand reveal_ , “none of you actually care about me.”

( _Run_ , a ghost whispers in his ear, clear and simple amidst the storm wreaking havoc on his very bones.)

“No, no, Wil, of course we do, we’re your _family_ ,” Tommy says, his lips trembling as he takes a step forward, “it’s why we’re doing any of this, it’s for you, we’re trying to help you because _this isn’t you_ -“

Wilbur laughs. He doesn't like putting up this brave front of someone terrible, something that exists only to hurt, the monster he’s always tried to avoid becoming. His throat aches with every breath, but he can’t stop until it devolves into a hysterical mess of choked sobs, and before he knows it he’s gripping and pulling at his curly fringe like a madman. He pauses for a second to collect himself, grins up at them, and lets all the guilt come crashing back into him. 

(If he breaks, and cries, and regrets ever taking Phil’s offer to _come home,_ let it be known that he’s grieving for them.)

“Isn’t it?”

He turns away from familiar faces, stalks towards the door while barely trusting that they’ll let him go, and he _runs_.

He doesn’t look back.

* * *

**11:**

Phil bleeds gold.

Wilbur finds this out accidentally. It all happened so quickly; one moment he’s lying half-conscious on his bed, the next he hears a heavy thud on the floor beside him, and then he’s lunging with nothing but fear fuelling his actions. 

Two things: 

One, it’s been less than a year since Phil and Techno took him in. Wilbur sleeps with a dagger under his pillow.

Two, Phil sometimes appears out of nowhere. Doors to him are still a human inconvenience.

Wilbur barely has any time to consider who he’s attacking because he’s slashing his dagger in a wide arc in the air. It meets the tiniest bit of resistance, and Wilbur hears a cry of shock, and the dagger is wrenched out of his hand by some unseen force. A hand comes down to grip his shoulder and for a second, he squirms against it.

“Wil! Wil, calm down,” a familiar voice says, “hey, mate, I’m sorry for barging in without any warning, hey, calm down, you know I always forget to use the door, son, hey, it’s alright-”

He throws a punch forward, his small fist meeting a steady chest. The hand pulls him closer, tighter, folds his body into a bigger, warmer one, all while a pair of strong feathery wings wrap protectively around him. Something in his brain must click, then, because he slumps over and wraps his arms around Phil’s torso. He squeezes his... _father_ , for a second, pressing his face into the crook of Phil’s neck and letting out a pathetic little whimper.

“Hey, hey buddy,” Phil mutters as Wilbur pulls away, “you alright?”

Wilbur looks down, where Phil clenches one fist away from him. Slowly, he reaches for that hand and pries it open as gently as he can manage, revealing a fresh cut along Phil’s palm. 

His father bleeds gold. His blood comes out in an otherworldly glow, molten gold forming small droplets on his hand. Wilbur feels something like a weight dropping to the bottom of his feet, something like a breath hitching at his throat, something that reminds him of all the cold nights spent running away from the orphanage that never wanted him-

“I’m sorry,” Wilbur whispers.

Phil smiles at him, impossibly warm. “It’s fine, Wil.” 

“No, it’s not,” Wilbur insists, hot tears stinging the edges of his eyes. He throws his gaze to the side. “I hurt you. I didn’t look first and I- I shouldn’t have, why aren’t you mad, I could’ve killed you or something, I don’t- I…”

“Wil, look at me.” 

He shuts up and does.

“I’m not mad, okay?” 

Phil is too kind for his own good. If only he could see the true, horrible nature of the _thing_ he’s brought under his roof, then maybe he wouldn’t be so kind. Maybe Wilbur would be running for his life with an angel hot on his heels instead of standing nervously in the embrace of a father. The thought claws relentlessly at him and suddenly he’s shaking in his father’s grasp.

“I’m not- look.” Phil closes his fist and his eyes glow a soft golden — the same colour as his blood. When he opens his fingers again, there is no cut, no blood, not even a scar. “You’re fine, okay?”

Wilbur sniffles and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “You’re not mad?”

“Of course not, Wil,” Phil says, slowly. “We’re family, and family means...”

“No one... gets left behind or forgotten?”

His father chuckles heartily, reaching up to ruffle his fluffy brown hair. “That, yeah, and- and it means that sometimes we make mistakes, and we mess up, and we get mad because of it-” Wilbur opens his mouth to apologise again but Phil holds a finger to his lips and smiles, “-but we don’t stay mad. We don’t hold grudges, we forgive, we look past our mistakes, and we move on, yeah?”

( _“Family,” Phil will say years later, and his eyes will crinkle as he looks kindly up at Wilbur, “are the people you choose to forgive time and time again._ ")

Wilbur nods. 

Phil runs a thumb under Wilbur’s eye, wiping away a stray tear. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Phil says. “I’ll try my best to remember that doors exist next time, alright?”

“Alright.”

Phil ruffles his hair again, and Wilbur bats his large hand away, feeling heat rise up his neck. “Go back to bed, Wil.”

“Can I have a day off school tomorrow?” Wilbur asks, fighting back a cheeky smile curling up on his lips.

“Nah,” Phil says, huffing as he stands. “That’s called extortion — who taught you that?” He pauses, thinking better of it. “Actually, mate, don’t tell me, I don’t wanna know. Go to bed, you little- you dirty crime boy.”

Wilbur laughs and scrambles back under his covers. His father leaves the dagger lying on the floor when he bids him goodnight. The next day, Wilbur tucks it deep in a drawer where he’ll eventually forget about its existence — he doesn’t need to sleep with it under his pillow anymore.

( _“Family,” Phil will say, and Wilbur will never forget these words for as long as he’s alive, “are the people you choose to let hurt you in the first place._ ")

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE SHOW SOME LOVE TO JAMIE [@georgesspotify](https://twitter.com/georgesspotify) ON TWITTER PLEASE THEY DREW SUCH LOVELY GORGEOUS ART FOR THIS STORY AND I CANNOT THANK THEM ENOUGH AND I CANNOT GUSH ENOUGH ABOUT HOW BEAUTIFUL IT LOOKS !!! HOLY SHIT !!! 
> 
> LINKS TO DA PIECES: [1](https://twitter.com/georgesspotify/status/1333113496540569600?s=20) and [2](https://twitter.com/georgesspotify/status/1332259193630277632?s=20)
> 
> i hope you all enjoyed this chapter!! :D leave some kudos or comments and let me know what you think!! i welcome any and all feedback, they make my day and my writer brain go brr!! <333 
> 
> i love yall and cya next update, we're getting into other POV's as they try to find mr soot and bring him home 👍 meanwhile, check out my [dsmp series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1973293) where i occasionally drop oneshots in!
> 
> anyway, have a good day and ily all!! <3


	2. you were always my favourite ghost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _”This is a story about desperation and we’ve all moved past the point of panic.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two months pog ! lets go its time for chapter two hell yeah
> 
> thank u to all the peeps who beta’ed for me, jamie and havok u two have my eternal love for putting up with my bullshit thumbs up emoji heart emoji
> 
> (obligatory reminder that my chapters are long dear god im so sorry if you can’t read them in one sitting, ive split them into smaller chunks and labelled them with numbers (1-8 in order for this chapter) and i recommend you ctrl+f the numbers!)
> 
> enjoy the chapter folks!

**1 - Phil:**

Wilbur’s room is empty when Phil opens it for the first time in weeks.

It’s not like Phil expects any differently. Wilbur isn’t going to be lying stretched out like a cat on his bed, or curled up in his chair with his old guitar, or flipping through the books neatly slotted in his shelf. A part of him still wonders — even after being completely sure that everything is exactly how Wilbur left it — whether he’ll find something if he snoops around hard enough.

Maybe a diary hidden beneath the floorboards that might explain everything. Or a note slipped in between his sheets that would tell Phil where his son is. Something, anything, to answer all the questions scrambling in his mind, to ease the anxiety in his veins, to tell him that this is intentional, that Wilbur is still alive, that he wants to be found at all.

( _Something, anything, to tell him that his son was ever his son in the first place_.)

But the room is, as the more cynical part of him muses, empty, and maybe the _thing_ in his son hates him enough to wrench away one of the most precious things in his life. Or the alternative — which he doesn’t want to think about — in which his son harbours enough resentment and bitterness built up over years of living in fear, that he didn’t even think of looking back when he ran out the doors of the warehouse.

Phil touches the wall and drags his fingers along the wallpaper. Dust clings to his fingers, and he tries to imagine that merely a few weeks ago, the room used to be lived in. That the guitar mounted on its stand isn’t terribly out of tune, that the clock on the wall hasn’t stopped ticking, and the house used to be filled with the sound of Wilbur’s music.

That the memories haunting this place weren’t always just memories.

A shiver runs down his spine even though it’s not even remotely cold, and a part of him can’t help but wonder, for the umpteenth time in weeks, if he was ever wrong.

Because the thing is, Wilbur Soot constantly moves.

Phil can’t remember ever seeing him completely still. He’d always have a leg bouncing against the floor, or a hand fiddling the hem of his clothes, or his eyes flitting nervously around the room. He gestures when he talks, plays with his hair when he’s not. His fingers twitch around the ghost of guitar strings and he paces around the room as he thinks and he can’t sit in the house for more than a few hours. Even when he’s sleeping, he’d be shuffling in bed and murmuring under his breath. Sometimes in the middle of the night, he’d wake up and then he’d wake Phil up and they’d tire each other out by talking about everything and nothing at all for hours.

Wilbur moves, and he changes, and he feels like a different person than he was a month ago. Wilbur loves attention but he’ll hate being watched. Wilbur would break a vase and pin the blame on Tommy without hesitation but Phil won’t ever forget the time he threw himself in the line of fire to protect Tubbo during a hunt gone wrong. Wilbur is an open book but no one can ever tell exactly what he’s thinking. All of these are true, all at the same fucking time, and Phil isn’t sure what to make of it.

It’s almost scary, knowing that his son has always been an enigma, and Phil thought that he’s finally learned to navigate his son, but he turned a page not ready to be read and suddenly there’s a whole new chapter he didn’t know existed.

So here, now, it feels wrong to be looking around Wilbur’s room. Untouched, stagnant, the air stale when Phil breathes in, the dust itching his skin where it settles on his arm, the way that Wilbur hasn’t performed his monthly ritual of completely changing the layout of his room.

The bed stays unmade from the morning of the day he left.

Something in Phil twists at the sight of it.

The room seems to sway with every step he takes, every minute movement he’s afraid to make in fear of accidentally knocking something over. Phil walks slowly, terrified of stirring the dust particles hanging in the air and disturbing the ghost living in these walls. He stands over Wilbur’s bed and he _doesn’t_ wince at the extremely human way that the sheets are all tangled up and messy.

Phil’s eyes wander and land on Wilbur’s bedside table, where there’s a small framed photo of the family taken years ago. He picks it up gingerly and looks it over, as if he’s reminiscing and not having his heart broken all over again, as if he’s still allowed to look at the world in strict blacks and whites, as if he’s not a complete hypocrite.

It makes his head spin, but he can’t seem to look away. He brushes a thumb over the photo idly, wiping the layer of dust covering Wilbur’s face — the crinkle-eyed grin that sixteen-year-old Wilbur sports in the photo, one of the only things that never changes about him.

It’s the same grin he’s had for the nine years they’ve been a family.

( _It’s the same grin that he gave them right before running away_.)

A part of Phil — the part that’s still terrified, still naïve, still tender from the revelation and the devastation — wants to hope. It glows in him, like a fire too timid to start burning, too weak to make a noise, too… _human_ , to be listened to.

He closes his eyes and sets the picture down harshly.

There is a darkness underneath the city, and whether Wilbur is the victim of the crossfire or the perpetrator itself _cannot_ stand in the way of his heavenly duty.

( _That’s what he tells himself, so that’s what he’ll believe_.)

Phil looks around the room again.

He tries to imagine Wilbur shouting at his clock and laughing when it lit up. He tries to remember what his son’s voice sounded like humming the tune of a song he wrote himself. He tries not to wish for all of it back, for him to be able to see Wilbur one last time, see him argue why anteaters are the worst animal, the way he’d gesture and his hands would wave around frantically as if he can’t possibly convey everything he’s thinking with words alone.

Because each time, _each fucking time_ , Phil would watch, and he’d be so intensely invested, so painfully envious of how _human_ Wilbur feels.

And now that it’s all been revealed to be a lie…

He tears away from the room. He’s got to stop looking, remembering, hoping, whatever, because if he keeps going, he’s not sure whether he’ll be able to take the weight in his chest.

.

It was during a particularly rough day that a young Wilbur asked him the question for the first time.

The question came completely out of left field. Phil didn’t think that any of his sons — let alone Wilbur, the normal human person in a family of otherworldly beings — had any reason to worry about his heavenly duty, only that they needed to keep an eye out and stay safe. It was his business and his business alone, they didn’t need to be caught up in it.

But earlier that day, Wilbur had come crying to him, blabbering about nightmares and voices and screaming and Phil had scooped him right up and talked to him until he calmed down. He had held his son close, feeling his life shake under his skin like the crumbling aftermath of a bonfire — his heart had ached because Phil had no idea what the first ten years of Wilbur’s life was like, but he’ll be damned if a twelve-year-old kid deserved to be haunted by such horrible memories.

So maybe he should’ve expected it when Wilbur turned to him that night as he was tucking his son into bed and asked:

“Why’re you still looking for it?”

Phil smiled down at his son and sat at the edge of his bed, feeling the mattress sink underneath his weight. “Why am I looking for what, sorry?”

“The… thing… that you were sent to… uh, to kill,” Wilbur muttered, pulling his covers a little higher up to cover his chin.

( _In hindsight, he should’ve seen the way Wilbur refused to look at him, or the way he tried to hide his expression of utter dismay, or the way his brown eyes were almost black in the low light, something as deep and dark as the shadows stretching in the corners of his bedroom_.)

Still, he reached a hand out to brush the curls falling over Wilbur’s face. His son shied away from the touch, and Phil felt something in him twist for the young orphan.

“I’ve gotta protect everyone in this city, Wil,” he explained, assured, believed. “I was sent down to kill something _not_ for the sake of killing it, but to protect the people who need to be protected from it, yeah?”

Wilbur shifted in his bed, turning away from him. He didn’t answer, so Phil took it as a sign that the conversation’s over. But as he stood and walked to the door to turn lights off, he almost missed the near-inaudible whisper from his son:

“And are you sure that it’s going to hurt everyone?”

Phil pursed his lips and flicked the switch, plunging the room into darkness. “Yeah,” he said. And then, hesitantly, “Good night, Wil.”

Wilbur didn’t return it.

.

Phil can’t help but think back to that night when now, Tommy finds him exiting Wilbur’s abandoned bedroom and stops him in the hallway to ask a too-familiar question.

“Why’re you still looking for him?”

Tommy’s a smart kid. Too smart for his own good. He asks the question not to hurt Phil, but not to make excuses for him either, and he says it in a way that’s both soft and curt in a way that only he can manage.

Phil feels his stomach twist into little knots, hands clenching at either side as he grimaces at the question. Tommy’s eyes flick down to study his expression and he keeps going, like he’s testing how hard he can press a bruise before the pain cuts too sharply.

“He obviously doesn’t want to be found,” he says. He crosses his arms, crimson claws pressing into his skin. “And you know that.”

His youngest son is a lot of things — chaotic ( _no shit_ ), reckless, eerily self-aware — but he can’t possibly know about the cracks starting to show in Phil’s resolve, about the way Phil would stay up at night and wish that his broken family would right itself, about the hope blooming in his chest every time they find a lead.

( _Tommy can do a lot of the things that come with being the spirit of chaos, but he’s not a mind reader, just someone who wants his brother back._ )

“It’s not him,” Phil replies, like he’s reading off a script he’s memorised word for word, and yet the syllables taste sour as he speaks them into existence. “It’s not. And… and even if it is, he still hurt us, and who knows what else, right?”

Tommy rolls his eyes at him. “You keep telling yourself that,” he scoffs, “no wonder you believe it so fuckin’ much.”

Phil wonders just what the _fuck_ that’s supposed to mean.

.

Wilbur Soot moves, and he changes, and he always feels like a different person than he was a month ago, but at least to Phil, he’s always been the same person for years.

And it hurts, now, because Wilbur was never meant to exist as a memory.

He doesn’t belong in the past. Not as a fond memory shared between family members, or as a frozen face in old photos framed on bedside desks, or as a name whispered in a broken home like taboo.

He doesn’t belong in the future, either. Not as a conflicted ‘what happens if’, or as a precaution that all of them have to look out for, or as the subject pinned onto a board and connected by strings to leads and theories and sightings.

To Phil, Wilbur belongs in the present.

He belongs to the moments forever preserved in time, turning his head up to the sky and feeling the sun’s warmth on his skin. He belongs to the guitar mounted on the stand in his room, eyes closed and voice shaky from misuse but still proud of his music like he’s never been proud of anything before. He belongs to their family, to their friends, to _home_ , and the fact that he’s not here, in the present where he’s supposed to be, hurts more than Phil could ever admit.

His absence is overwhelming, crushing, impossibly loud in its silence, and it makes Phil’s chest constrict at the sheer claustrophobia of all the things that his son’s supposed to be and yet he’s _not_.

Wilbur Soot isn’t meant to exist as a memory, and yet all Phil can do is remember. The present feels too big, too empty, too horrible, and he’s going to keep denying the situation if it means that he’ll stop wishing that time itself can be reversed.

.

( _The moment repeats itself behind his eyelids like a broken record player singing its last song every time Phil tries to go to sleep._

_Wilbur’s eyes wide and wet and glinting a horrible crimson, lips pulled up in a smile that looks painful to keep up. A part of Phil — impossibly hopeful — wants to rush forward and pull him into a hug because that’s what fathers are supposed to do, but instead he’s holding a sword and he has every intention to use it if Wilbur so much as_ moves _the wrong way. It’s like — as Wilbur would describe it — balancing on the tip of a needle, or watching a car crash in slow motion, or falling along the length of a cliffside where the sea meets the rocks below._

_But then Wilbur relents, and speaks, and laughs, and then he’s moving, changing, running out the door the same person he came in yet feeling like he’s adopted a whole new identity altogether._

_And just like that it’s over._

_Phil doesn’t sleep much anymore. He thinks about Wilbur, and he thinks about dark, evil entities, and then he’s not sure what else to think about._ )

* * *

**2 - Tubbo:**

It’s not like no one ever talks about it.

But these days, it’s getting harder to keep doing what they’ve been doing this whole time and pretend like it’s not eating them all up inside. Because the elephant in the room no longer exists in words, but the gaping hole in their daily routines that almost seems to challenge them to acknowledge it.

So instead of talking about _it_ , they ignore that hole as best as they can and when they can’t, they turn to the three hunters tasked with tracking him down.

And the life of a hunter, Tubbo decides, is a strange one.

He knows from listening to hours of Tommy’s rambling that Techno always keeps his hunter’s dagger close by. That he always has it on his person, that he always keeps it in sight and in arm’s range, that he sleeps with it clenched in a fist.

He knows from listening to Fundy gush about his _best friend Dream_ that Dream has spent years upon years studying dead languages and burning incantations to memory. That he’s as likely to drop something and swear in Enochian as he is in English. That he’s intimately knowledgeable in even the most obscure of spells because _who knows when I might need them, right_?

Tubbo knows, and more importantly he _understands_. His family members don’t question it when they walk into his room to find his shelves full of case files and tomes about creatures, his walls covered in pictures and notes and red string tying each one together, the surface of his desk buried under open books and scribbled theories and he’s slowly going insane trying to piece together this horrible puzzle.

“Tubbo?” Eret asks, their white eyes widening as they take in the state of the room, as they look at him half-slumped over his messy desk like he’s just a normal teenager facing a stressful finals’ week. “Are you alright?”

Tearing his eyes away from the file he’s been writing all over, he blinks blearily up at Eret and nods slowly. “Yeah? Why wouldn’t I be?”

“It’s almost three in the morning,” Eret says, pressing their mouth into a thin line, eyebrows scrunching in concern.

“Oh. Really?” Tubbo glances at the clock on his wall. “Oh. Right. Fuck, sorry, did I wake you up?”

Eret shakes their head. They’re… not quite as affected by the situation as the rest of them are. As blindsided as they were by Wilbur’s revelation, they were never as close to Phil’s family as Tubbo and Niki are, and like Fundy, they were always preoccupied by the task of looking after the two younger siblings of their family and providing for all of them.

“I was working, don’t worry about me.” Eret sits on his bed and leans against the bed frame, eyes wandering around the room and resting on the red strings ‘decorating’ the walls. “Did you find anything from today’s hunt?”

Tubbo sighs and swivels around in his chair to face his brother. “Nope,” he says, “Just, uh… just the usual, I guess. Or, uh, not really, I think we’ve got a lead here.”

Eret smiles softly at him. “Case?”

“Um… someone came across the remains of a spectre, but… it wasn’t like, dead, or anything.” He reaches back to grab the file and skims through it even though he must’ve read its contents a thousand times over. “It’s weird — it should’ve faded away into chaos energy as soon as the vessel is killed, but this one… this one was just… lying there. Unresponsive even when provoked and prodded at. And uh… I called Tommy over to inspect it and he, uh, he confirmed what I suspected: that the vessel’s been completely sucked dry of chaos energy and that the spectre’s just… good as dead, I guess.”

His brother hums, nodding. “And you think that this might be his doing?”

Tubbo reaches up to drag a hand down his face, gritting his teeth in frustration as he throws the file onto the bed, watching it flop open to a random page. “I don’t think that it’s _him_ ,” he says, spits, his words coming out sharper than he intended, “I think that it’s the… the _thing_ in him, no, I _know_ it’s the thing. It’s gotta be. I mean, who the f- who else- _what_ else could it have been, right?”

Tubbo regrets his tone as soon as he stops talking, a chill spreading from his throat to the rest of his body. He clamps his mouth shut and effectively melts into his seat.

“Sorry.” He tears his gaze away from Eret and fixes his eyes onto the bed frame instead.

Eret shakes their head. “It’s fine, I know you’re frustrated.”

“I’m not- I’m not frustrated at you, man.”

“I know that. You wanna tell me about it?”

“I just…” he starts, “I just- it’s been like, three months. Almost four, now, since he, uh… since, the… y’know.” He gestures with a hand. “We’ve been chasing down lead after lead and- and nothing’s come of it. We’re no closer to finding h- it, than we were three months ago.”

His brother nods and presses their lips together.

“And, I don’t know, it just feels like we’re… we’re missing something. Like, we’re so _close_ to solving it and finding its trail and- and getting him back that-“

A warmth on his arm interrupts him and Tubbo looks down to find the gem on his wrist glowing softly. A foreign trickle of annoyance seeps into his mind, and he glances at Eret. They shrug nonchalantly at him. He sighs and wraps his fingers around it.

“Hey,” he says.

The gem heats up in his hand.

“Oh, shit,” he mutters, “sorry I woke you up, I was trying to work out today’s case.”

The annoyance quickly morphs to vague curiosity and a sliver of hope that twists painfully in him.

“No, no, uh, nothing yet. Sorry. I’ll tell you about it in the morning.”

From the corner of his eyes, he sees Eret quirking an eyebrow up. After a few seconds, he feels worry beginning to bloom at the back of his head.

“Just… just go back to sleep, Tommy. Look, I’ll try not to get frustrated again, okay?”

A wave of warmth washes over him, making him close his eyes and shiver. It subsides quickly as Tommy hangs up on his end. Tubbo opens his palm and lets the gem dangle freely from his wrist, ending the connection.

“Well,” Eret says, breaking the short silence, “it _is_ three in the morning.” They shrug as he shoots them a halfhearted glare, too tired to put any real heat behind it. “You should also… _probably_ go to bed soon, y’know.”

Tubbo looks down.

“Probably.”

His eyes wander and find the case file laying on the bed.

“Eret?”

“Hm?”

“What do you think?”

“About the case?”

“Yeah, and… about everything else. Just this whole, uh, this whole mess.”

Eret reaches forward and takes the case file, leafing through the pages as they read Tubbo’s notes. They turn a page and their expression wavers, eyebrows scrunched together in deep thought, or worry, or revelation. In something, at least, an invaluable asset that only a fresh pair of eyes can provide.

After a long while or silence, they look back up at Tubbo.

“I think,” they start, “that you guys might be thinking a little too…complex.”

“What does that mean,” Tubbo mutters, tone as dead as he feels.

“You guys are- you guys are looking for _it_ , right?”

“Well, yeah, what else are we supposed to-“

“No, I mean- okay, what kind of trails are you looking for?”

Tubbo looks behind him, at the wall of notes and pictures and string.

( _He’s heard of legends of hunters working on missing persons’ cases, of hunters losing themselves the more they try to find the lost. Myths of spells that could vanish a person, erase them off the face of the earth that not even deities can find them. Stories of spools of red thread that, when followed, would lead you straight to whoever you need to find, that sometimes you’d find them whole and sometimes you’d find your own bones scattered on the ground._

_He wonders if he’s following that same path, if one of these days one of them will dig too deeply into the case and disappear just like Wilbur did. If it’s happened already, and they’re running with their hands out in the dark and blindly chasing the first light they see. If they’re lost, and they got lost the moment they tried to solve the unsolvable._

_He wonders if this, if any of this was worth it at all. Maybe if he follows the red thread on his wall he’d find what he really needs to._ )

“I’m not sure what to call them,” Tubbo says. “Phil calls it ‘dark energy’, but... I think it’s just raw magic, at the end of the day. It’s got his signature, at least.” He gestures at the file. “Whenever a case like this turns up, the site’s always… uh, thick with this energy, and that’s how we know it’s him.”

“But?”

“But it stops there.” He closes his eyes, rubs a hand over his face, tries not to get too frustrated so he won’t wake Tommy up again. “And then it dissipates after a few days. It’s a lead, but it doesn’t- it doesn’t _lead_ anywhere.”

Eret hums, nodding along. They purse their lips in sympathy, as if what they all need right now is sympathy and not answers.

“I just...” he mutters lowly, “okay. Fresh pair of eyes, what do you think?”

“I think,” Eret says, “that you guys are thinking a little too complex.”

“You _just_ said that-“

“I think that you might be looking for the wrong thing,” his brother interrupts. “I was there too, Tubbo. If what he said is true, then he spent almost two decades posing as a human.” They smile at him, shrugging. “You might be looking for the wrong kind of trail here.”

Tubbo falls silent for a moment.

“Just… consider that.”

“Maybe,” he says, slowly, “maybe, I mean, that’s a possibility.”

“It is. But have you tried to entertain it?”

“That would mean that- that… the, the Wilbur we knew is... has always been...”

“Yeah.” Eret nods. “It would.”

And instead of answering, Tubbo shuts his eyes and buries his face in his hands, a low whine building up at the back of his throat. He opens his mouth to speak, but what comes out is something between a strangled laugh and a sob.

“It would,” he agrees, after a few seconds of painful silence.

“Yeah.”

As much as he loves his brother, Eret always had a penchant for playing the devil’s advocate and realising the ugly truth only to shove it into people’s faces. Sometimes it’s needed, like in this situation, but sometimes it hurts, like in this situation, too.

But Tubbo knows — he can’t stay in his echo chamber of ignorance forever.

“Why’d you become a hunter?” Eret asks, almost out of nowhere.

"Uh... I thought you knew-“

Eret sets down the case file and turns their full attention to him. “No, no, remind me. I want to hear you say it.”

“Uh...” he pauses, “because...”

( _Because six years ago I saw a feral thing maul you half to death and leave you blind._

_Because six years ago it was only because of Dream and Technoblade that you didn’t die._

_Because six years ago I wanted to exact revenge over the fact that you have to rely on the shitty blessings of a deity to see._ )

“...because I want to save people,” he settles.

“Because you want to save people,” Eret repeats, nodding.

Eret stands, moving to stand beside him before bending down to face him eye-to-eye. They reach out with both hands, cupping his ears before leaning in and pressing their lips on the crown of his head. _For comfort, for strength, a reminder for the wayward to come back home_.

He looks up at his brother, at the concern laid bare in the creases between his eyebrows, and reaches up with shaky hands to return the gesture. _Affirmation, a sign of acceptance, and most importantly, reciprocation._

Eret pulls away and pats his cheek with a fond smile, sliding the case file into his hands. They turn and walk towards his door. “Remember that,” they say, “and go to bed, Tubbo, you can keep working in the morning,” and then they’re gone, closing the door behind them.

Tubbo lets out a breath he doesn’t know he’s been holding in.

As soon as the door shuts, he stands up from his chair and tosses the case file to the side, letting it fall onto the floor. He steps closer to his wall, entranced by all the pieces of paper he’s pinned and scribbled over.

He reaches up and touches the red string, sliding his finger along its length, absentmindedly tracing the intricate shapes he’d made with it. Eret’s words ring in his head, almost mockingly loud, telling him that the answer may have been in front of him this whole time, telling him that he’s been too focused on the trees that he missed when the forest caught on fire, telling him that all he needs to do is to open his eyes.

So he does.

He stops at a collection of pictures pinned together in one corner. They’re of Wilbur, or at least the _thing_ wearing his face, and it makes him feel antsy just to look at. He can’t help but wonder _how long_ or _why_ or-

Or… who.

_Who are you_ , he wants to ask the pictures on his wall, _who have you been this whole time_? What exactly is he looking at, and _why_ can’t he seem to realise that it- that the _thing_ -

No.

He’s not looking at a _thing_ , is the problem, he’s looking at Wilbur.

Sun-kissed, wet-haired Wilbur on the beach. Wilbur, smiling until his honey eyes crinkle, an arm around Niki. Wilbur, so in love with life that Tubbo wonders whether they’ll ever get that back. Wilbur who has a family, who has friends, who runs a hand through his hair when he’s nervous, loves flying but is afraid of heights, asks people about their day to fill up awkward silences and most importantly, is their _friend_.

Wilbur, who they’re hunting down, who they’re trying to save, who Tubbo isn’t sure what to think of anymore.

Tubbo wonders how this all happened. It’s… it’s got to be a mistake, or a misunderstanding, or maybe he’s trying to convince himself of something that isn’t real. He rakes a hand through his hair, pulls at the locks of his hair, tries to compartmentalise but wants to let it all free.

Right now, there are two courses of action available: what he needs to do and what he wants to do.

There’s what he needs to do — stop playing with the red thread and pick up his case file and continue working. Shut down this deviant train of thought and stick to what he believes in, stick to what he _knows_. Things would be so much fucking simpler. He wouldn’t be hovering his finger over Wilbur’s face in those damn pictures.

There’s what he _wants_ to do — close his eyes and ignore the world and pretend like things are back the way they used to be, that he’s still deadpanning jokes at his friends and Niki’s still learning how to play the guitar and Tommy’s still losing at cards and Wilbur’s still got the golden sunlight caressing his younger, happier face.

No one told him it’d hurt this much to choose. Yes, he became a hunter to help people and save lives, but no one told him he’d have to _think for his own fucking self_.

It would’ve been easier if Wilbur hadn’t been the way he was. If he hadn’t thrown himself in the line of fire to save Tubbo in one hunt and missed his sixteenth birthday because he’d wasted weeks in a coma. If he hadn’t spent so long teaching Niki how to play the guitar and encouraged her to sing and wrote songs with her. If he hadn’t been one of the only people who _listened_ to Tommy and soaked in every word and knew exactly how to reel in his innate chaotic nature.

If his eyes didn’t crinkle when he smiled and his grins weren’t so boyish, if he didn’t tower over them and liked to sling an arm over their shoulders, if he didn’t gift Tubbo and Tommy the twin gems to congratulate Tubbo officially becoming a hunter and helped them enchant it.

( _He’d been the first one to celebrate, too, when Tubbo successfully sent his first distant message to Tommy two rooms away, and he had pulled Tubbo into a hug and told him that he was proud of him and twirled his hair around a finger and Tubbo’s heart had leapt high in his chest._ )

Tubbo swallows a thick block in his throat.

His head hurts just by remembering, and he needs to keep working, and he wants to let it all go, and he doesn’t know how or why he’s still going but… but there’s something else.

( _What the legends fail to say is that you_ choose _to find the lost, you_ want _to vanish before you do. These hunters give up and they wander out and they choose to never come back and there’s no happy ending because they stop and they lose themselves._

_Here’s the thing about Tubbo: he’s not going down that same path._ )

There’s what he _can_ do.

And what he can do is choose.

( _He never liked legends anyway_.)

He hooks a finger around a red thread and plucks it. The ensuing sound resonates like the string of a guitar.

Tubbo closes his eyes and makes the choice.

* * *

**3 - Niki:**

Niki knows that she should probably say something. She does. But the idea — and the _reality_ — of Wilbur Soot, real and alive, is enough to make her thoughts run rampant around her head like a planet orbiting the Sun but never quite reaching it.

Wilbur stands right on the edge of the pier. His hair, tucked into a beanie, has grown longer, and he’s wearing a dark jumper with both hands shoved deep in his pockets, hunched over as he looks out into the sea. Even from behind, she can tell it’s him, can tell exactly what kind of wistful expression he’s got on his face, can tell exactly what he’s thinking.

There’s something about seeing him for the first time in so long that kickstarts an odd mix of fear and rage and relief in her. She wants to say ‘ _where have you been_ ’ and she wants to say ‘ _get out the sea does not deserve you_ ’ and she wants to say ‘ _come home_ ’ but before she can say any of that, he turns.

And he smiles.

The way he smiles feels foreign.

He looks years younger and decades older at the same time, and he smiles with his whole face but there’s something in his eyes that raises her hackles. He runs his hand through his fringe and he steps back, so dangerously close to the water that she can ask it to swallow him if she really wants to.

But he’s happy, at least superficially, and Niki can’t take that away from him, from herself.

( _And he’s happy — the kind of happiness that simmers beneath your skin like a pot of water on the edge of boiling, the kind of happiness that feels like a piece of paper ready to tear, the kind of happiness that has a foot off the edge and threatens to turn into something else if you don’t reel it in._

_The kind of happiness they only found in each other, hand-in-hand as they walked down the street leading away from the docks, light chatter between them as he took her downtown for the first time in her life. And though the sea called for her, filling her ears with the songs of conch shells, she found that drowning it out was a lot easier when she’s got her best friend cracking jokes at every turn._

_The kind of happiness that, for a second, gives her hope._ )

Wilbur steps closer, eyes dark and unreadable.

Niki suppresses a full-body shiver.

Half a year of dead ends upon dead ends, and here he is. She’s almost afraid of how captivated she is by the nervous curve of his smile, by how his shoulders hunch up just that tiny bit, by how he shuffles his feet as if he can’t find his centre of gravity. They’re supposed to be hunting it down, not… not looking at it and finding Wilbur in all the little things it fails to hide.

And it hurts to think that five years ago, same place, same people, he was doing the same thing, trivially nervous at the prospect of talking to a girl, a glimpse of what could’ve been when Niki wants to imagine that he’s human, that they can live a happy life.

“Niki,” he starts, voice breaking at the second syllable.

She bites. “Wil.”

“Hey,” he says, as if they’re meeting for the first time all over again, and not standing on the fence that decides who gets to walk away. “It’s, it’s been a while.”

“Yeah.”

She closes her eyes. The sea would warn her of any dangers, and she’d half-expected it to start roaring in her ears, but today it’s quiet, waiting to hear the punchline with bated breath.

“I don’t want to fight you,” she says. “I don’t want to fight at all.”

And instead the wind shuffles up next to her, a whisper dead on its tongue. She clasps her hands behind her back, where it gathers between her fingers and slithers up her arms to circle her neck.

' _Help me_ ,' she thinks, ' _he’s here and I don’t know what to do_.'

“If you came here — the docks, the… the pier — does that mean that you’re not… completely…?”

_Gone_ is left unsaid, loud and clear for the both of them, and the wind flutters away with her words.

“I just want to help. We… me and him, we- we used to come here all the time, and we’d, we’d hang out and talk for hours and- and I just want him back.”

She opens her eyes slowly, sunlight catching between her eyelashes. He’s still looking at her with that strange look in his eyes, with that foreign smile on his lips. She doesn’t know what to think of him, of it, of any of this, and that’s what scares her the most.

“Please,” she says.

“You talk as if I- as if your Wilbur is dead.”

“I just, I just want him back. I just want- I don’t know, I just want to help.”

He brushes his fringe to the side, fingers lingering on his hair where she swears he tried to twirl it around his pointer. And she wants to scream, _you don’t get to do that_ , and she wants to do it to him too, and she wants so many things but does none of it.

“Please don’t go,” she whispers.

A brief pain flashes through his face. “I won’t,” he blurts out, melting before her very eyes, changing into the Wilbur she knows seamlessly. “I won’t. Okay. I promise, I- I think you at least deserve an, an explanation.”

“Thank you.” She exhales, letting her shoulders sag. “For, for not leaving, I mean. Wil. I… is it okay if I call you Wil?”

He blinks. Presses his lips together. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

Niki falters. “I just thought that…”

“…Oh,” he says, voice small, “no, yeah, I get it- no, it’s fine. Um. I’m. I’m sorry.” He pauses, eyes flickering between her face and her feet. “For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry. I really am.”

“For disappearing?”

“Yeah.”

“And running away?”

“And- and that.”

“And for _lying_ to us, to me, for- for the past- how many years has it been…?”

He winces. “Yeah. Niki-“

“You hurt us, back then,” she says, trying very hard not to get choked up, trying very hard not to remember how it feels like to see her best friend writhe in pain and have her world crash all around her, and failing at both miserably. “Was it a- when you, when you ran away, before that, I mean, you said- you said that you’re the only one in… in that body, and you said that Wilbur died a long time ago. What- what happened to him?”

He grimaces, closing his eyes for a few seconds. He hugs his arm close to his body, and hunches the slightest bit more as if trying to make himself as small as possible. But he doesn’t answer, and that only serves to fuel the flames in her chest.

“Or was that a lie, too?” she asks. “Was that- was all of that a lie, how _much_ have you lied about, how much of _him_ is you, and how much of you is _him_? ”

Her voice cracks, thins out, and speaking — letting go of all that she’s been bottling up for the past few months — hurts her in ways she cannot comprehend, aches her body all over again and pulling her back to day one, _sitting across a boy playing a guitar_ , and pulling her back to the next day one, _getting her breath choked out of her by an unseen force as she tries to plead for air but nothing’s coming out_.

It’s five years past day one and six months past the next, but she doesn’t think she can ever really let go of either.

“I just want him back.” Niki inhales, looks up at him, puffs out her chest and straightens her back. “What happened to him? Where the _fuck_ is he?”

“Niki,” he says, a little too harshly, and she flinches, clamps her mouth shut immediately.

A pause.

“I’m scaring the shit out of you,” he says, softer.

She stays silent, and that must tell him much more than she can ever say in words because his expression falls.

“Niki.”

She meets his eyes. “Yeah?”

His eyebrows scrunch together and her eyes follow the way the skin between them folds up. Wilbur would do that all the time, when he was worried, when he was confused, when he was turning the pegs of his guitar and focusing on the sound of each string.

“Are you afraid of me?” he asks.

“Why would you lie to us?” she says, sounding a lot calmer than she feels as she takes a step forward.

He watches her move towards him. “I’m not going to hurt you, you know.”

“We’re your friends, we’re not- you should have _told_ us, we would’ve understood.”

“And I’m your friend- I don’t _want_ to hurt you.”

“But you did,” she says. “You lied and you hurt us and- even though we’re your friends, you still did.”

Courage flares in her chest for a fleeting moment and she dares herself to take another step forward, and another, and another, and another, until they’re functionally sharing the same breath.

He’s so tall, she realises, as if she’s never complained about it to him a million times before. He dwarfs her in size, and he could snap a hand up and strangle her to death and she could sic the water on him and make him sleep with the fishes but neither of them make a move to hurt the other.

Part of her wants to get it over with, to give him a shove and let the sea drag him away.

Part of her wants to wrap her arms around him and make sure he won’t disappear on her again.

And here’s the problem: she does neither. She could never bring herself to do either.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats, “I don’t know what else to say; I’m sorry,” and Niki accepts it this time. If he ever wanted to hurt her, she would already be dead.

She holds eye contact with him, daring him to lie. “Alright.”

He sees it, and understanding dawns on his eyes. “Alright?”

“Yeah. Let’s… let’s say I trust you.”

“Okay,” he says after a pause.

“So what happened to Wilbur…?”

“He… okay, there was never a… ’Wilbur Soot’, in here. This, this body-“ he gestures at himself, fingers brushing against his clothes, “was born without a soul. I don’t, uh, the human memory has its limits, but I remember that I needed to hide from, from Phil, and…”

He runs a hand over his mouth. She can almost believe it.

“And uh, think of it like… a homeless man living in a manless home,” he finishes lamely.

“How do I know you’re not just saying that?” _How do I know you’re not lying, like you have been, all this time_?

“Niki, I’m not- I’m still _me_ ,” he says, desperation showing only in his dark eyes. “There’s no evil spirit in me, I’m, okay, I guess there is, but- but it’s always been me, okay?” He takes a deep breath, fidgets with the fabric of his jumper. “I’ve always been Wilbur, Wilbur’s always been me, and, and I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

( _“Aren’t I?” Wilbur asks, upending her whole world with two words. “Because last I checked I was the only one in here. Last I checked, Wilbur died a long, long time ago.”_

_And then he smiles._

_The way he smiles feels foreign._

_He looks five years younger and centuries older at the same time, and he smiles with his whole face but his eyes glint a crimson far too many shades brighter than his gentle brown. He wipes the tears from his cheeks and his voice cracks, so dangerously close to breaking everything she’s ever known that she isn’t sure if the answer is as easy as she wants it to be._

_But he’s scared, and so is she, and Niki can’t possibly decide who deserves it more than the other._ )

“That doesn’t prove anything,” she says.

He nods, carefully. “I know. But you said, uh, let’s say you trust me, right?”

_Let’s say I trust you, now let’s say you trust me too_.

She inhales. Nods back at him. “Right.” They’re alone, at least for now. No reason not to dig a little deeper, no reason not to be completely honest in the face of the most dangerous person in this situation. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

They’re going in circles, but at least they’re going somewhere.

“If I did, I’d be dead a long time ago.”

Her phone buzzes in her pocket. His eyes snap down.

“Why’d you run?” she asks, brushing a hand against her phone.

He looks nervously back at her. “I didn’t- I was scared, and they were hurting me too.”

Another buzz.

“Why didn’t you come back?”

“I- Niki- did you, did you call anyone-?”

“Did you want me to?”

“The fuck- no, of _course_ not, why would you-“

“Why did you stay in the first place?”

“No- Primes, what did you _do_?”

A sudden shout in the distance has him tearing away from her, eyes flicking behind her and body tensing up. She surges forward, hands shooting out to grab onto his arms as she presses on, desperate to keep him there, desperate to dig all the answers out of him, desperate to understand.

“Why would you do this to us?” she spits, tightening her grip against his struggle, trying to push him closer to the sea where he won’t escape from.

He shoves back, pulls, twists them around when that doesn’t work. “Who did you call- how, Niki, Niki let me go, please- I have to get out of here-“

He yanks, starts to move, and Niki keeps holding onto him, stumbling after him as she tries to hold him in place. Around them, the sea boils and bubbles, apprehension parting the waves as they rage around the pair, ready to strike with the flick of her finger.

“Why’d you stay?” she shouts, voice barely heard over the crashing.

A strong wave of rushing wind hits them. His eyes widen. “Get off me, get _off_ me, please- let go of me-“

“Why are you doing any of this?” she cries, loud and clear amidst the screaming wind, and-

“ _Because I want to live_!” he yells. He finally tears himself out of her grip, cradling his hands close to his chest. He looks at her, horrified, betrayal etching every line of his face.

His eyes are so, so brown. Brown and kind and gentle and _hurt_ , and Niki’s phone buzzes again and there is another shout and suddenly they are red, crimson reflected on his fluttering eyelashes as his gaze drills into hers.

“I just want to be human,” he says, quietly, eyes still red and face still foreign, risking escape with every second that passes, “I want a family, I want a _life_ , Niki, please, I need to go- I _need to go_ -“

He turns, she moves, and the sleeve of his jumper barely slips through her fingers as he runs.

Niki stumbles, falls to her knees, looks up and watches him go. For the second time in her life, Wilbur Soot turns his back on her a different man than he was when he faced her. Except here, now, she could’ve kept him from running, could’ve convinced him to stay, but does neither, ultimately.

The sea simmers down and breaks away from her, turning back to its usual meandering at the lack of a command, and she is hit with the weight of everything she could’ve done but _didn’t_ , everything she needed to say but was too blinded by the unfamiliar fear of staring into a friend’s eyes and having a stranger look back at you. A stranger who claims to be him, who claims that he’s always been that friend, who she doesn’t know what to think of.

His figure disappears far into the city, blocks away before two people come into view. Tubbo and Technoblade split in two directions, one booking it after Wilbur and one rushing down the pier to find her.

“Niki!” her brother yells as he drops to his knees and slides up to her. “You- are you alright? Quackity sent us here and we- we tried to come immediately and Techno’s chasing after him and Dream’s going to be contacting Philza and, oh Primes, what happened, did he hurt you-?”

“Tubbo?” she asks, out of breath and out of thought for the first time since this whole mess started to turn her life sideways. “Tubbo, _Tubbo_ -“

Tubbo nods vigorously, hands coming out to clench her shoulders and giving her something to ground herself with. “Yeah- yeah, I’m here, I’m here-“

Niki shakes her head, grasping his hands as she looks deep into his eyes. Blue, electric, swirling with the emotions of his other half, worry that isn’t entirely his creasing the lines of his face.

“Tubbo,” she repeats, “I think- I think we’ve got it all wrong-“

She wants to run, she wants to scream, she wants to fall and cry and sink deep into the ocean where none of this would come and plague her.

“Niki, look, we’ve found him, okay? You did so well, you did, now we’ve just gotta make sure he doesn’t get away again-“

“No, no, no, Tubbo, listen, I don’t think- look, he said- he’s-“

She wants to believe him. She wants to reject it. She wants- she... she wants to think, she needs to think, the thoughts are there and they’re circling her head a thousand miles a minute and at some point they’re going to crash and burn against each other.

“I don’t know what he said to you, okay, but you have to remember- it’s, it’s a good liar, Niki, you can’t listen to it, it’s only going to lie to you-“

“Listen, _listen_ -!”

Tubbo tightens his grip around her shoulders, gritting his teeth in frustration. “ _What_?”

Time is running out, and all her choices meld together with all her wants, and everything she thought she ever knew slips out of her grasp before she can properly close her fist around a single concrete one. Half-formed thoughts scream for attention and half-wrecked beliefs come crawling out the woodwork. She’s stranded in the middle, lost in her own head, caught in a never-ending whirlpool of _could’ve, would’ve, should’ve_ and, loudest of all, _why didn’t I_.

“We’ve got it all wrong,” she pleads, holding eye contact with her brother. Blue against blue. Sea against spark. Sibling against sibling, the most tragic fight of them all. “We do, please-

But at the end of it, she closes her fist, makes a choice. The ocean stills, the waves freeze over, and the storm makes way to the voice of its daughter.

( _“Last I checked,” Wilbur says, that horrible grin painfully stretched across his face, “none of you actually care about me.”_

_And Niki feels her entire being ache at that. She wants to scream, ‘what happened to you?’, because somewhere along the way, something crawled in and took away their Wilbur, the one who lives for kindness and loves so deeply that it hurts to watch._

_The two of them meshed so well together because he is kind, and she is too, and two kind people will always gravitate towards each other. But even she knows that the world is unfair, that there are some things that no matter how hard he tries to love, will never love him back as much._

_Things like the universe._

_Things like the sea._

_Things like what their family is turning out to be._ )

Tubbo grimaces, pulls away, reaches for his phone and turns his back on her. Niki stays, exhales, relief flooding her senses as the world rights itself, finally.

(' _Let’s say I trust you, and let’s say you trust me_ ,' Niki thinks, ' _so please don’t fucking fail me now._ ')

* * *

**4 - Phil**

Phil dreams.

He dreams of things that don’t make any sense.

He dreams of late night smoothies and watching empty cars pass by and disappear into smoke.

He dreams of flying, of moving up and up and up until his wings freeze and the gates of heaven slip by the tips of his fingers and he falls and the ground morphs into sea.

He dreams of driving a sword through someone’s gut, flames licking his hands as the world melts into debris and dust, craters yawning open beneath him.

Then he wakes up, and the dreams fade into the part of his brain he keeps carefully shut with lock and key and denial. He focuses on his life; reality over sleep, family over reality, and then work over everything.

Nowadays he finds it a little harder to stay at home so he spends more time outside, side by side with Techno and Tubbo and Dream, spearheading the hunt for his lost son. Nowadays he dreams, but he doesn’t sleep a lot, and he can’t bear to stay at home where the sound of music no longer permeates the walls, and he can’t look Tommy in the eyes without seeing Wilbur in the way he tilts his head — so yes, work above all.

And life goes on.

Phil doesn’t come home until it’s late at night and his wings are sore from hours of flying above the city and trying to spot a lanky figure.

He visits Tubbo’s family, finds Tommy hanging out with them more than he sees him at their own house.

He doesn’t see Technoblade in days and it’s only by Dream texting him ‘ _he’s with me_ ’ that he knows he hasn’t lost another son.

He hasn’t opened Wilbur’s room in weeks and does his best to forget about the guitar mounted on the wall, untouched, unharmed, out of sight yet not out of mind, does his best to pretend that dust hasn’t rendered the air unbreathable yet.

But all it takes is one call from Dream, one trip to the pier, one look at Niki who turns towards him with azure eyes blazing with determination, to shatter his naïve confidence. She looks up at him and she tells him, “ _We’ve got it all wrong,_ ” and she tells him everything and he-

Phil dreams.

He dreams of things that don’t make any sense.

But he doesn’t dream of black, and golden, and red, and a figure moving too fast for his eyes to catch.

In one dream he is talking to Niki about her family and red horns sprout out her head and her face morphs into Tommy’s and he’s spitting insults into his face.

In one dream Techno is missing, is running, is disappearing just like Wilbur did, hot on his heels and looking to get lost.

In one dream the world melts all around him and his head is spinning and he’s not sure how to stand upright anymore.

In his reality, all three scenarios are happening.

Niki tells him everything and Phil falls silent at the resolve burning bright behind her eyes. Tommy pulls him aside and tells him, “ _I told you so_ ,” and looks at Phil with disbelief when all he can manage out is “ _Okay_.”

Technoblade is gone, always the first to run, always the first to chase after the ghost. A part of him thinks ' _He’s going to get hurt_ ' and another part thinks ' _Wilbur would never hurt him_ ' and another part thinks ' _But would Techno do the same to his brother_ ' and all of him screams ' _Is it really Wilbur though_ '.

His world melts around him and he tears away from the situation, muttering a half-hearted “ _I need to think_ ” before he’s trying to get away from Niki and Tommy and Dream and Tubbo and the idea that Wilbur wouldn’t lie to them and the idea that it’s always been Wilbur and the idea that he needs to stay true to his roots and he has to obey his orders and he wants to come home where he belongs and he’s going to have to kill his own son and he-

Everyone’s looking at him as if he’s supposed to give them the answers they need.

As if he’s not looking for his own.

.

When Wilbur asked the question for the second time, they were sitting pressed up against each other on the couch. Phil had a wing draped over Wilbur’s body, cocooning him in feathers, and neither of them mentioned the fact that Wilbur leaned into the touch. They’ve been sat there for hours, talking about life and philosophy and history well into absurd hours of the night, insomniac and inhuman understanding each other on a level deeper than anyone else.

At some point, they’d lapsed into silence, and Wilbur had asked him about his wings. Phil thought for a moment before sharing stories about angels and heaven and the capacity of his kind to show unconditional love, and Wilbur had shuddered under his wing and closed his eyes. He had this look on his face — hovering somewhere between relief and conflict — and it only made Phil pull his son closer to him.

Wilbur’s eyes were puffy, grey bags under them and mirrored in Phil’s own face. His hands wrapped tighter around himself, lips half-parted as he breathed through his mouth, nose all stuffed up from the breakdown he had earlier.

He looked so human, then, so vulnerable, and Phil was hit with a terrible, terrifying feeling, one that sent him breathless and reeling and- and he thought, ' _I’d start a war to keep you safe forever_ ', because this was _his son_ and there was little he wouldn’t do for his sons.

And then, the question came. Wilbur turned his head away from Phil, eyebrows fighting not to get scrunched, and he brought his hands up to his mouth and muttered the words muffled into his skin:

“Why’re you still looking for it?”

Phil took a sharp breath, blinking quickly.

“Because… because it’s evil,” he said, his voice soft, and something inside him hurt when Wilbur’s shoulders tensed up and he swallowed audibly. “And I’ve gotta kill it — it’s my heavenly duty, Wil, I’ve gotta finish it if I want to go home.”

Wilbur exhaled deeply, eyes fixed on the floor. His eyelids flicked down and his eyes glinted golden; it might have been a trick of the light but Phil wouldn’t be surprised if there was a little bit of inhumanity in his son. That’s just how the world works — no one is pure and there will always be a little bit of inhumanity in every human.

“And you want to go home,” Wilbur said, looking back up at Phil with an expression that Phil isn’t sure how to read.

“Of course I do — it’s where I belong.”

“There. Not- not here. With us.”

Phil opened his mouth, a rebuttal ready to be spat out at the tip of his tongue, but all he could do at that moment was choke on air and meet Wilbur’s perceptive eyes and clamp his mouth shut. He mulled it over in his head, fingers burning at the point of contact on Wilbur’s skin.

He sighed. “You know that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry, mate, that came out harsh. Okay. No, of course I want to go home, but you guys are… the reason that I stayed in the first place, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Wilbur echoed. “You- you said- unconditional love.”

“I did.”

“D’you really mean that?”

He did.

( _Still does_.)

“Always,” Phil said, watching as Wilbur fiddled with his hands, watching as Wilbur tangled his fingers through his hair and pulled at his strands, watching as Wilbur ran his fingers through Phil’s feathers, touching them as if they were back on Day One and Wilbur had never touched the wing of an angel before.

“And you’re going to kill it,” Wilbur muttered, his voice hollow.

Phil wondered what Wilbur was thinking, if he was thinking about dark creatures and utter destruction and things that burn in heaven’s fire.

( _Phil knows what Wilbur was thinking, now, that he was thinking of songs sung by the pier, of friends who threw themselves in the line of fire to protect friends, of fathers and wings wrapped around him and brothers and horns butted into his chest and tusks pressing against his fingers._

_He knows, now, because he’s also wishing for the same things back, of homes and families and times when Wilbur would show him songs he wrote because he trusted Phil, and not miles away where Phil isn’t sure he’ll find him, of places where they could simply exist and be a family and not have their happiest memories tinged bittersweet._ )

“I have to,” Phil assured him, and ignored the way he broke eye contact and his eyes flickered back to brown.

( _He looked so hurt, then, so betrayed, and looking back on that moment, Phil is hit with a terrible, terrifying feeling, one that makes him cry into his hands in the middle of the night:_ I’d raze the Earth to have you back, _but that’d be a lie, but that’d be the truth, but he doesn’t want to kill his own son though he knows he has to, he has to, he has to_.)

.

Tommy grabs his arm as Phil is turning away, fangs bared in frustration as he drills his gaze into Phil’s eyes. And when Phil tries to nudge him away, he tightens his grip on Phil, claws digging into his skin, and asks the one question he wouldn’t give up on:

“Why’re you still looking for him?”

Phil looks at him, and then he almost smiles because out of all his children, Tommy is the bravest one, the one with the kind of strength fierce enough to believe in something and never let go. Wilbur moves and changes, Techno pulls back and disappears, but Tommy is loyal, unwavering in his values.

He speaks in that blunt and kind voice — the same voice he’d use to encourage Wilbur to talk to women or to coerce Techno out of his room or to assure Phil he’ll be fine, except they’re all so far away from _normal_ that he’s using that voice to convince Phil not to kill his brother. It’s been half a year since either of them saw Wilbur, and Tommy’s still able to see right through him, to strike where it hurts most and choose the right words to send Phil spiralling.

“I have to stop him,” Phil replies, but even as he speaks them, the words taste sour on his tongue.

Tommy scoffs. “From doing what?”

“From, from hurting people,” Phil says, “he’s- he’s dangerous, and if we let him keep going, he’s… eventually, he’ll do some real damage.”

Tommy sees right through him, blue eyes wide and wise and all-too-clever. “And you’re going to put that above him.”

“It’s my duty to stop him.”

“He’s your _son_.”

Tommy steps forward, a spark between the horns on his head, a snarl threatening to break out on his expression, a challenge evident in the way he glares up at Phil. He lets go of Phil before his claws can break skin and draw blood.

“He’s my fucking brother.”

“I know,” Phil says, breathless, unsure, as if he didn’t spend countless hours trying to draw the line between Wilbur and the _thing_ , as if he isn’t sure where it is, as if the conclusion he reached was that there isn’t a line at all. “I know,” he repeats, for good measure, “but I still- I still have to. I can’t- I can’t let him hurt anyone.”

“You act as if he even wants to. You _know_ him.”

“Even if I do, I’ve still gotta save him-“

“And _this_ isn’t how you do it!” Tommy snaps, throwing his hands up.

The gem hooked to his necklace starts glowing.

Tommy barely spares it a glance before he curls a hand around it. Eyes still fixed on Phil, his nostrils flare as he takes a deep breath. “Sorry,” he mutters, “I’ll calm down,” and lets it fall from his fingers.

Phil watches the gem’s glow fade, watches a dozen different emotions flick through Tommy’s face, knowing full well the same storm is raging through his own head.

“I think,” his son starts, “you need to think about your priorities. Sort them out or something.” He shoves his hands into his pockets, drawing away from Phil as the heat of his emotions fade from his expression. “Techno won’t listen to me at all. I think you should, before you make a mistake you can’t fuckin’ take back.”

Tommy swivels on his heels and stalks away, grabbing Niki on the way and sauntering off to meet with the rest of their friends. Phil stays where he is, his body half-poised to run, his mind half-set on staying.

He reaches up to touch the spot where Tommy grabbed him, gingerly running his fingers over the dent marks left by Tommy’s claws. The pain grounds him, reminds him that he may be a being of cosmic proportions but his body is all too human, his feet are still touching the ground, and his heart still yearns for his sons.

He doesn’t even need to feel the wetness on his cheeks to know that he’s crying.

.

Phil dreams.

His memories plague his dreams and angels aren’t supposed to dream, aren’t even supposed to sleep, but he’s doing it anyway.

He dreams of late night smoothies and feeling jealous of the mundane.

He dreams of flying and then of falling.

He dreams of driving a sword into someone’s guts and grieving the loss of his enemy.

Then he wakes up, he tries his best to forget that he even dreamt at all, and he convinces himself that he keeps waking up in the middle of the night because he has to piss and not because he doesn’t want to stay trapped in his own head.

His mind whispers to him in the dead of night, a confusing mix of feelings he’s not quite human enough to decipher, constantly echoing words he’d rather forget about, words like _we don’t stay mad_ and _get away from me_ and _unconditional love_ and _are you going to kill them._

He closes his eyes and Wilbur lies dead on the floor.

He opens his eyes and Wilbur is missing from their house.

He wants to go back to sleep, but there’s a heavy pain in his chest that demands more than what he can give, and it’s irrational but he’s scared of sleeping and waking up to a house more empty than it already is.

So instead he thinks. He sits on the edge of his bed and he holds his head in his hands and he thinks.

He thinks of smoothies and of flying and of swords. He thinks of things that don’t make sense, that need to be solved, that don’t _want_ to be solved. And then he thinks of the one constant in all of them, the only thing that never changes.

Because Wilbur is there, Primes, _Wilbur is always there_ , has always been there since day fucking one. The empty space where he’s supposed to be won’t stop haunting Phil. Wilbur is there sharing the smoothie with him and Wilbur is there clinging onto his wings and Wilbur is there with a sword in his gut and grieving for his father’s anguish.

The unfortunate reality is that Phil is going to have to kill his own son if he wants to go home.

And that’s the twist, isn’t it? That this is his son, that this has always been his son.

Because... Wilbur is not a liar. Yes, he lies, and yes, he cheats, but he is not a liar, because liars tell lies and they get caught and then they do it again, but Phil thinks back to when Niki begged him to believe her when she said Wilbur regretted lying.

And Phil... doesn’t know what to do with this information, this realisation. It’s been more than half a year and he’s barely accepted that Wilbur isn’t here anymore. The only reason he hadn’t gone mad was because he firmly stayed under the pretence that there was some malicious force out of their control, an evil spirit taking Wilbur hostage and tearing everything apart, but...

But... the reality is that there isn’t.

It’s just Wilbur.

Wilbur, who wormed his way into their family and their hearts, who lied through his teeth and adolescent life but never wanted to.

Wilbur, who they almost killed and who almost killed them, who spat in their faces and upturned the world they thought they knew.

Wilbur, who’s only ever known and shown kindness, who cannot recognise self preservation even if it slapped him across the face, who loves to sing but is nervous about his own music, who smiles with his whole face and can’t talk to women and who _doesn’t want to be found_.

Wilbur, who is part of their family.

Who is his _son_.

_._

( _Phil dreams of the past and the future and a hundred thousand what if’s._

_He dreams of words never said and people never found._

_He dreams of his wings around Wilbur’s body, of the curve of Wilbur’s smile and every crease of his eyes, of pulling him into an embrace and telling him everything’s going to be okay._

_He dreams of a future they could’ve had, of unbroken hearts and untold lies, of ‘_ Get away from me’ _and_ ‘This isn’t you’ _and_ ‘Let them go’.

_He dreams of the fear that they’ve made far too many mistakes far too late; the fear that first, they couldn’t save Wilbur from the darkness; the fear that second, they couldn’t save him from his fate; the fear that lastly, they couldn’t save him at all._ )

* * *

**5 - Technoblade:**

The last time they were this close, they almost killed each other.

_But the last time they were, Wilbur was still family_.

Wilbur, cornered into an alley, has his back to Techno. He’s staring somewhere between the wall and the ground, shoulders tense as Techno loads his crossbow with an arrow enchanted with magic strong enough to knock out a leviathan.

“You know it’s not too late to turn back,” Wilbur says.

Techno raises his weapon and points it where Wilbur’s heart is. “And you know it’s not too late to turn yourself in, either.”

Wilbur looks over his shoulder. “Both of us know I’m not going to do that.”

“And both of us know I can’t let you go.”

Wilbur laughs, chest heaving as the sound wreaks through his whole body. A part of Techno, long buried under months of compartmentalisation and denial and crushing betrayal, yearns to join in instinctively, as if they’re still kids and they’re laughing at a stupid meme shared between their phones. But the laugh comes out unfamiliar, choked, comes out dry and scathing and cynical and everything Wilbur Soot isn’t.

“Oh, that’s funny, that’s really funny, no- what do you suggest we do then?” He swivels around, stepping backwards until his back hits the wall. “C’mon, what’re you going to do, _Technoblade_?” He spits the name like poison. “You know _I_ hold all the cards here, _I’ve_ got dear Wilbur in _my_ clutch and you’re not going to- you’re not going to give up on your _brother_ , are you-?”

Techno raises the crossbow a little higher and shoots.

The arrow hits its target with deadly accuracy and a violent thwack.

He watches Wilbur’s expression change, eyes widening and mouth shutting instantaneously, the cocky façade draining out his face along with all the colour in his cheeks. Wilbur stands still and completely frozen, both hands trembling, itching to yank out the arrow stuck to the wall inches away from the tip of his left ear.

“I think,” Techno drawls, “that you should consider comin’ with me.” He stands straighter, squares his shoulders, glares back at Wilbur with a heat that wasn’t previously there. “I’m a big fan of the rule of threes — you’ve just wasted number one.”

As soon as the words leave his mouth, a dark look flashes across Wilbur’s face. ~~His brother~~ the _thing_ grits Wilbur’s teeth together, filling his face with unfamiliar rage and burning defiance, so close to yet so far from all of Techno’s memories of Wilbur, fuelled by anger and passion and the sort of stubbornness only possessed by someone who thinks he’s in the right.

( _They used to come to each other when neither wanted to be alone but neither wanted to talk. Techno would knock on Wilbur’s door and his brother would take one look at his grumpy face and let him in without question. Or alternatively, Wilbur would come unprompted into Techno’s room wearing a thick sweater and an angry expression and Techno would silently offer him a seat on the bed._

_There were never many words exchanged between them — never words, because even though Wilbur is a wordsmith bred and born, Techno always found it hard to navigate the world through speech and Wilbur- he knows that. He knows Techno too fucking well. He knows exactly when to talk and when not to make a sound._

_So Techno would sit on his chair and read a nice book and Wilbur would lay on the bed scrolling through social media. Sometimes Techno’s phone would buzz and he’d find a message from Wilbur of a link to a funny post on Twitter, and then he’d exhale out his nose and Wilbur’s eyebrows would furrow a little bit less. And if he finished a book he particularly liked while Wilbur was there, he’d toss him the book and Wilbur would read the blurb, and if he decided he was interested then he’d give Techno a thumbs up and return it in a few days._

_Such was their routine, and each time, they’d leave the other’s room as wordlessly as they came in, but they’d feel infinitely better after having spent time with their other half._ )

“Well you know what I think? I think- I think that you’re full of shit,” it snarls. “I think you’re a coward and, and you’re a fucking hypocrite.”

It twitches Wilbur’s fingers by its sides, shoulders tensing as if it’s getting ready to throw a punch and play dirty. Unfortunately for it, the both of them know who would win in a fair fight. Wilbur’s eyes follow Techno’s hand slipping down to grab another arrow, faltering as Techno loads it into his crossbow.

Still, his expression deepens in resolve and he takes a threatening step forward, face scrunched up and flushed red all the way through, looking as if he has every intention to launch himself forward and claw Techno’s face right off.

Wilbur moves jerkily, like he’s not sure how to control ~~his own body~~ the body _it_ has inhabited for far too long. But there’s hesitance in his movements; he cocks his head and clenches his fists and stands tall and rigid, calculated abnormality in all the ways he presents himself, as if he’s trying too hard to be as off-putting as possible. But unfortunately for him, too, Technoblade isn’t one to fall for his tricks and get unnerved by the way it puppeteers Wilbur’s body.

“You’re not going to shoot me, _Technoblade_ ,” Wilbur hisses, squinting his eyes to hide the uncertainty blooming in them, the clear doubt that Techno had honed in on as soon as it appeared. “I know you’re not going to; you’re too much of a fucking coward to do anything of the sort.”

He barks out a laugh — too forced to be anything but a scare tactic.

“You’re- you’re not going to hurt me,” he says, “I know you’re not going to do anything, you can’t fucking hurt me in a way that matters — not while I’m wearing the face of your _brother_ -“

Techno shoots again.

The second arrow hits the wall with another thwack.

The arrow vibrates at the force of the impact and Wilbur cries out, eyes squeezing shut as he flinches, and flinches _hard_. He freezes in pure terror for the second time that day, trembling as he reaches up and runs a finger gingerly along the earlobe of his right ear, where the arrow has nicked off a bit of skin. His finger comes away with a spot of blood.

“What the fuck,” Wilbur croaks out, staring intently at the red on his hand. “What the _fuck_.”

“I don’t think you’re in any position to be challengin’ me,” Techno growls, baring his teeth as the tide of power shifts in his favor.

The _thing_ exhales weakly, glued to the wall and trembling in all the places Wilbur would when he gets scared. His bottom lip, his fingers, his shoulders — hell, it’s even blinking his eyes as hard and fast as he always used to. It’s almost amusing to Techno, watching its desperation to pass off as someone it’s not, watching that furious bravado melt and morph into the terrifying realisation that Technoblade keeps every promise he makes even if it means driving an arrow between his brother’s eyes.

( _But the last time they sat together in silence, Wilbur had looked up and made eye contact and even though Techno hadn’t wanted to speak that day, he still tried to prompt a conversation._

_“Techno,” he’d said, and Techno grunted in response as they looked at each other, “I think-“ he pauses, mouth opening and closing and eyes clouded over in conflict, “I want to- uh, look, I think that…”_

_Techno watched as his brother’s expression changed, and then changed, and then changed again a thousand times a second, a million thoughts racing through his head and each one briefly flashing by in his eyes. Wilbur set his phone down on Techno’s bed and pulled his knees up close to his chest._

_He broke eye contact first. “I- uh… right,” he made a distressed noise at the back of his throat, “yeah, no. Okay. Sorry- I’m… sorry.”_

_“You good?” Techno asked, the first words he’d said in hours._

_“Yeah, I just… thought of something, I guess.” Wilbur ran a hand through his hair. “No, okay, no, it’s nothing. It’s nothing, sorry.”_

_Techno grunted again. “You can tell me anythin’.”_

_“I know.” Wilbur inhaled deeply, closing his eyes. “Okay. I’ve been thinking. About. About you, and then, uh… I guess about us?” He gestured between them. “Like how, uh, one day you’re going to go out there and you won’t come back and- and we’re going to drift apart, and…”_

_“Yeah?”_

_“And- and I don’t_ want _us to drift apart,” he said. “I don’t- I don’t want to lose you as quickly. I just… okay, okay, right. Techno, let’s never fight.”  
_

_Techno raised an eyebrow._

_“Let’s never argue again. Let’s- let’s not do that, ever.”_

_“Sure,” Techno said, shrugging._

_And then a week later, Phil called him downstairs during an ungodly hour of the night and told him,_ I’ve found it _. Techno keeps every promise he makes. He doesn’t like to think of all the ones he should never have tried to keep in the first place_.)

“Please,” the thing says in Wilbur’s breathless voice, “look, Techno- what the _fuck_ , you… you fucking maniac,” it laughs again, but nervously, “I- I thought- you, oh Primes, you _really_ -“

_The greater good_ , Techno reminds himself as he brushes away the memory. It lingers at the back of his mind, pooling together with all the doubts he’d accumulated from staring into Wilbur’s face and questioning himself. His hand flies down to grab another arrow and he sees Wilbur’s eyes widen, nothing but terror pooling behind his pupils as his gaze follows every one of Techno’s movements.

“Techno, Techno- please, no, look,” the thing says, stuttering over each word, losing more and more of Wilbur’s inherent eloquence as Techno loads the arrow into his crossbow with a loud click. “You don’t have to do this- please, _please_ -“

“Are you goin’ to come with me?”

“I can’t, you don’t understand, _I can’t_ , Techno, please, let me go-“

“You’ve just wasted number two.”

“-Techno, please, _listen to me_ , I’m not- I don’t want to fight you, I don’t want to- I don’t want to die, please, I’m still Wilbur, I’m still your _brother-_ “

Techno pulls the trigger.

The arrow is released.

Wilbur’s eyes widen, time freezing and the world bending around the tip of the arrow headed directly between them.

For a fleeting second, Technoblade sees his brother in the hurt flashing in his face — he would’ve yelled out Wilbur’s name but he can’t take back an arrow once it’s flying — but the problem with a fleeting second is that it’s over too soon, and then Wilbur swipes a hand in an arc across the air and the arrow splinters and all hell breaks loose.

Raw magic rips its way through the air in a blinding flash of light and heat and noise, sending a shockwave of pure power rocking the earth in every direction.

The force of it throws Techno backwards, spears through his skin and tears through his insides, leaving burn marks in its wake. He barely registers hitting the floor and crying out.

( _In so many ways, Wilbur had been the perfect complement to Technoblade’s story that it’s a miracle the universe brought them together in the first place._

_Where Techno is quiet and analytical and monotone, Wilbur speaks and feels and emotes. Where Wilbur bursts with passion and throws himself in danger and loses his cool in tense situations, Techno keeps them grounded and safe and level-headed. Where Wilbur refuses to fight, Techno knows what has to be done._

_His brain wrecks itself thinking about it. He runs himself ragged going on hunts, remembers everything he discovered, trains himself to compartmentalise and then compartmentalises some more. He imagines the first time he ever met Wilbur, surrounded by the fading bodies of hellhounds and the promise of a home that will love him back. When he can’t sleep and he’s staring blank-eyed into the sky, he wonders what life would’ve been like if they never found Wilbur and wonders if that’d be the better alternative._

_He thinks about young Wilbur, cowering from Phil and shaking violently from cold and starvation._

_And because he’s a masochist — they all are — he keeps thinking of Wilbur, every person he’d been and every person Techno doesn’t want to admit are one and the same._

_He imagines Wilbur Soot, lonely orphan boy; and Wilbur Soot, artistic outgoing brother; and Wilbur Soot, red-eyed and crackling with dark energy. One of which he never got the chance to know, one of which he knows as intimately as the back of his hand, and one of which he doesn’t think he wants to know at all._

_That’s how Wilbur’s story starts and ends — on the run from the life he thought he lived, except the first time over he’d been completely alone. This time they’ve intertwined their stories so tightly together that ripping them apart had sent a horrible ripple slicing through their lives._

_In so many ways, Wilbur had been the perfect foil to Technoblade’s mythos, the one person with power enough to upend his world so devastatingly_.)

At the end of the alleyway, Wilbur isn’t looking too good either. His legs are barely strong enough to hold him upright, body pressed against the wall behind him and shaking all over, looking at Techno with wide eyes dark and empty and crawling with an emotion Techno can only describe as desperation.

“Technoblade,” he mutters, barely loud enough for Techno to hear even with his sharp hearing, “you… you’d really…”

Techno draws himself up to his swaying feet, gripping his crossbow close to his chest and one hand already hovering by his quiver. His mouth moves around a whispered prayer to his deity, and with every word he utters, he feels strength trickling back into his body. He glares up at Wilbur, heart freezing stone cold as whatever doubts he previously had washes away together with nausea from the impact.

Wilbur has a hand raised in front of him, the skin of his fingers stained black with… something. His expression hardens, jaw working as he swallows down the betrayal etched on his face. Techno feels it: a force building under his feet, shifting and boiling and waiting to strike up and engulf him whole. He moves a foot backward, poising himself to run or to lunge forward, keeping his centre of gravity as low as possible.

“I could kill you, right here, right now,” Wilbur says, his voice low and threatening and wavering, “you know, I could, I _really_ could.” His lips start twitching. “You… you made it clear that you’d still- that you, you don’t care, huh.”

He inhales deeply, eyebrows furrowed and nodding to himself. Techno stays frozen in place, every one of his muscles tense and ready to spring at the first sign of action.

“Are you afraid to die, Technoblade?” Wilbur asks, looking back up at him.

Eyes blazing red, he smiles a devilish grin, as if he can hear the way Techno’s heart thunders in his chest.

“I think you are,” he says. “I think you’re a coward and a fucking hypocrite. I think you don’t want to die almost as much as you want to kill me.”

He cocks his head, hair falling easily to one side.

“So I’m going to walk away, and you’re going to let me. You’re not going to follow me either. If I so much as see you _move_ the wrong way-“ he flicks his wrist around, electing to ignore how shaky his hand is, “you’re fucking _dead_.”

“Fuck you,” Techno spits, because he’s not sure what else to do, if there’s anything else he _can_ do.

Wilbur pushes himself away from the wall, walking towards Techno, a limp in his steps as he moves past him. Neither of them look at each other as Wilbur leaves; neither turn around until it’s way too late and Techno can no longer hear his brother’s footsteps; neither want to think about the bond they’ve left broken on the dirt.

And Techno wonders, for the umpteenth time, what the _fuck_ he’s going to do now.

( _He imagines Wilbur at the pier, in the warehouse, in the forest, back at home. He wonders if Wilbur still thinks about them, if he’s happier now that he’s shed all the lies holding him down, if he’s happy at all. He imagines a Wilbur without a home, a brother without his family, and he’s not sure he has the capacity to comprehend any of that that while staring down the thing still so fucking adamant that its name is Wilbur Soot._

_His mind feels all clouded over, nebulous thoughts racing past each other and every one screaming for attention as loudly as the next. He can’t shake off the feeling that he’s made a grave mistake, that he’s got something wrong, that they need more time but can’t afford it._

_His hand itches for another arrow_.)

Wilbur is gone, as he always is, and this time Techno isn’t sure where to follow or whether he even _wants_ to. He draws himself up to his full height and puts his crossbow away, chest heaving with rapid breaths.

He’s so fucking tired. Maybe it’s time to go home.

* * *

**6 - Schlatt:**

They look at each other.

There’s a million things he wants to say.

Some are teetering on the tip of his tongue, are things that spawned out of the relief clogging up the base of his throat — _where have you_ been and are _you going to hurt us_ and _why did you come here_.

Some are less obvious, words bouncing between the walls of his brain, almost loud enough for him to hear — _who are you_ and _you almost killed all of us_ and _I’m sorry_.

The rest are locked deep in him, shoved into the darkest corners and locked up never to see the light of day again. Things like _I thought you were dead_ and _I missed you_ and _please don’t go_.

There’s a million things he wants to say and all of them die together along with whatever scraps of _true_ courage he thought he had.

Instead, he says, “How the fuck did you get in?”, like a complete idiot, and the sound floats between them like a shitty ghost, hovering in the air, resonating through time and space and his echoey living room.

Beside him, Alex shoots a hand out to grab his wrist in a vice grip, breath hitching at the sight of Wilbur, alone in a room with the two of them. It’s as if time has stopped for all of them, like everything else has gone silent, and it’s just the three of them frozen solid at the same time, suffocating in the stagnant space between them and pointedly ignoring the unshakable feeling that they’re on their way to meet the end.

“Hey,” Wilbur whispers.

“How the fuck did you get in?” Schlatt repeats.

“I need a place to stay,” Wilbur says, looking between the two of them, “one night, just- just, one night, and I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow.”

“The front door was fuckin’ locked.”

“Okay- just a couple hours, _please_.”

“Wil,” Alex cuts in, his eyes wide, “yes- fuck, yes of course you can stay, what the _fuck_ -“

“Oh, okay, oh Primes, _thank you-_ “

“Did you crawl in through the goddamn window-“

Wilbur collapses. No other way to describe it; his knees buckle and he falls like a puppet whose strings have been sliced cleanly through, him in all his 6’5 twig-like glory crashing onto the floor. Alex makes a strangled noise at the back of his throat as Schlatt throws himself forward, catching Wilbur’s body before he could hit his head on the ground.

“Wilbur?” Schlatt mutters, cradling his head in his lap. “Hey- hey, what, what the fuck happened, buddy?”

Wilbur blinks up at him, eyes flickering between brown and red. His face is pale — _too pale_ — and he’s clutching his hands close to his chest, hunching in on himself and shaking all over as he struggles to breathe.

“I’m here, I’m awake- sorry,” Wilbur says, “I’m sorry, I’m just- I’m just so fucking tired, man.”

“Primes, what happened to you?” Alex asks as he sits down next to Schlatt. He reaches forward, pries Wilbur’s hands away from each other.

“I- I can’t, I’m just... I’m so sorry-“

Alex holds Wilbur’s hands in his own, gripping them as if to ground the two of them. Wilbur’s fingers are dark, less like he’s gotten frostbite and more as if he’s dipped them in black paint.

Schlatt watches as Alex swallows, his eyes drinking in Wilbur’s ragged appearance as if he’s trying to convince himself that this is real, as if Wilbur will disappear once he looks away.

“You, uh, your skin feels cold and- and clammy.” He pauses as Wilbur clenches him back. His thumb rubs circles on Wilbur’s skin absently, just like he’d always do to Schlatt to calm him down. “You good, man?”

“No,” Wilbur grits out, squeezing his eyes shut, “it fucking hurts.”

“Are you, uh, injured…?” Schlatt asks.

“I don’t know, I don’t- I don’t think so,” Wilbur says, breathless, choked, “I just, I can’t- I can’t fucking stop it- I don’t know what to do.”

His shoulders jerk up violently as he flinches with his whole body. There are scars on his hands, on his arms, on his face, far more than the last time Schlatt’s seen him. Wilbur Soot isn’t a fighter like the rest of his family is, and these scars look relatively new, so Schlatt wonders — not for the first and certainly not for the last time — what the absolute _hell_ he’s been up to in the six months he’s been off the grid.

Wilbur shudders the flinch away. “I don’t _fucking_ know what to do, Primes, it fucking hurts, you don’t understand, no one does-“

Alex, at a complete loss for ideas, looks up at Schlatt, eyebrows furrowing together and glancing at the doors to the room. “Should we… should we call Phil… ?”

“No!” Wilbur yells, suddenly. He hacks out a cough, one hand flying down to clutch his abdomen, the other clawing uselessly at the ground. “Please,” he says, “please don’t- please don’t call him, any of them, I can’t- _please_ , I can’t do this again-“

“What the fuck happened, man?” Schlatt demands. “Look, we can’t, we don’t know how to help you if you don’t _tell us_ -“

“It was Technoblade!” Wilbur spits, face scrunched up in pain of more levels than merely physical. “It was- he, he chased me down to an alley and he- and he…” He inhales deeply, voice dropping to a weak whisper. “He tried to kill me.”

A laugh, broken.

“He almost did, too. I had to- I had to threaten his life to escape but-“ he reaches a hand up to the side of his head. Schlatt follows the motion, grimacing as he spots a fresh wound on his earlobe. “He still- I thought…”

They lapse into silence. Whatever horrible pain was tearing Wilbur up inside seems to have subsided after a while, because he settles, the lines on his face smoothing out and his muscles unclenching ever so slowly. Schlatt watches him as he breathes, watches him simply exist, watches and catches the exact moment the cogs in his head whir to life; a million expressions flying by his face, each warring violently with the last.

There’s nothing scarier, Schlatt decides, than watching a friend writhe in pain while he’s helpless and unable to do anything. He’d rather die than admit it, but Wilbur’s hands aren’t the only ones shaking. If he concentrates hard enough, he thinks he might hear three heartbeats drumming in sync, in anticipation, in fear for one life.

Wilbur plants a hand flat on the ground and heaves himself up, wincing as he does. He sits up slowly, tucking his knees close to his chest, eyes fixed blankly on the floor.

“He doesn’t- he doesn’t care,” Wilbur says, his voice a thread away from breaking into a sob. “I- I thought we were brothers but… but he doesn’t- he doesn’t give a shit about that, apparently. He… he doesn’t care, none of them- none of _you_ care enough to… oh Primes. _Primes_.”

“Wil,” Alex starts, mouth opening and closing as if looking for the right words to say, “You- you can’t say that shit, man, _of course_ we care-“

Wilbur looks up at Alex for a moment, studying him. He shifts his gaze over to Schlatt, and he has to remind himself that _this is his friend_ , this person sitting and shaking and spilling his thoughts out into the air is Wilbur. The last time Schlatt saw him, his cheeks weren’t so sallow and his hair wasn’t as long and things haven’t gone completely to shit.

He looks back at Wilbur, searches his face, searches his eyes and doesn’t know what else to search. This is why it’s so fucking frustrating, trying to read Wilbur. Everything about him is so, _so_ intense, and his expressions have layers and his words are stacked with lies. The fucker thinks that it’s slick but he’s an open book if you know exactly how to decipher his language.

Luckily for himself, Schlatt’s always been _great_ at picking apart his friends.

So here’s his official verdict of the case of Wilbur Soot.

“They’re going to kill me,” Wilbur says. “They’re going to keep hunting me down and they’re going to kill me and, and they won’t care that I- that we used to- that I was- I- I…”

Wilbur cares too much about his family, about his friends. It’s honestly almost pathetic to watch and Schlatt would absolutely chastise him for giving too much of a shit if he doesn’t feel the exact same way towards Alex.

( _Alex might not be his family, is definitely not his friend, but he’s... he’s Alex._

_It’s a lot more complicated than that, it goes a lot deeper than ‘_ We’ve known each other our whole lives _’, it’s so, so much more. Because they grew up together, because they were- no,_ are _there for each other when no one else is, because Alex is, always will be, the only one Schlatt trusts with his life and his future and his everything, and the reverse is true even though neither would admit it out loud, ever._ )

“I can’t, I can’t die, you don’t understand, _I can’t die_.” Wilbur folds his arms together, pressing them into his chest, trying to make himself look as small as possible. “There’s still something- if you kill me I’ll be gone but- but _it_ will still be here and I- I won’t be around to-“

Wilbur is afraid to die. Granted, who isn’t? He’s always been the most… _alive_ , out of all of them, the most animated person Schlatt’s ever met, and if the sight of Wilbur in pain was enough to shake him to his core, he’s not sure he’ll be able to see him dead.

( _The first time he’d seen Wilbur be completely still was in a hospital bed, eyes closed and deep in a coma, looking like he’d kicked the bucket._

'Wilbur' _, Schlatt had thought,_ 'you idiot' _, and then he’d looked away because something in him had shattered at the sight._ )

“If you, if they kill me, what happens to me will be worse than death but… but if I don’t die, it’ll grow and grow and I’ll- I’ll hurt people, I have to- I have to destroy it, I have to die, I…”

Wilbur would give his life the _second_ someone he loves asks him to. Schlatt’s seen it before — the unyielding protectiveness intertwined with the call of the void bubbling under his skin, the impossibly selfish way he’d throw himself in danger if it meant he got to keep someone else safe.

_(It comes with all the frustrations of turning the other cheek, of offering your life to someone and trusting that they wouldn’t drop it, or if they did, that they did it because they loved you._

_If anything, this is the one sentiment that the both of them understand each other for; Schlatt’s seen the way Wilbur looks at Tubbo, at Niki, at Tommy, hell, even at him and Alex — the way he’s given himself up to the sort of fierce, raging protectiveness that extends far beyond possessiveness, far beyond selflessness, far beyond giving, and giving, and giving, and expecting nothing back._ )

“And… and once it’s gone I’ll be… I’ll… okay- okay. Yeah. I can- okay, I need to…”

Wilbur is stubborn. Everything about him is intense and nothing about him changes once he’s set his mind in stone. It runs in his family, apparently, the lot of them would never admit to being wrong, would never _dare_ to realize that there’s a better way, that there _has to be a better way._

Schlatt exchanges a glance with Alex.

“Schlatt, Quackity,” Wilbur says, halting his rambling. His eyelashes flutter open, expression settling into hard resolve, resignation gradually replacing the devastation on his face, “Listen to me, I… Here’s what’s going to happen, okay?”

Schlatt snaps his gaze back to Wilbur, dread pooling at the bottom of his stomach as his instincts flare up and scream at him to run, to hide, to fight back. If this was any other situation, he’d be grabbing onto Alex and screaming at him to get the both of them _out_.

Wilbur breaks into a smile, forced and tentative. “I’m going to, I’m going to get out of here and I’m going to run. You… you have to understand, you’ve forced my hand and _I have to do this_ -” he hesitates, his face shuttering for a moment, “I’ll destroy this entire city-“

“Wilbur,” Schlatt interjects at the same time he hears Alex’s breath hitch high in his throat, “what the fuck?”

“I’ll- I’ll plant bombs in the fucking ground and,” Wilbur says, laughs mirthlessly, drags a hand up his face and clutches the tips of his fringe, “and in one week I’m going to blow it all to kingdom come, I’ll do it- I’ll, I’ll destroy everything and I’m going to kill them _all_ and- and you need to-“

Alex moves, hands shooting out to grab Wilbur by the shoulders. Wilbur looks at him, looking every bit the wild animal he sounds like, looking like he wants to drop dead as much as he wants to claw Alex’s face off. He does neither, keeps rambling, keeps talking out his ass and Schlatt isn’t sure whether his words hold any truth to them.

“You’re going to tell them, okay?” he says. The fog lifts from his eyes as he grabs Alex’s forearms, shaking as if he never stopped. “ _You need to tell them all to fucking run_ , you’re going to tell Phil, and Phil’s going get them all out, and, and I’ll- I…”

He closes his eyes, yanks Alex’s hands off his shoulders like he’s flicking a bug from his arm.

“Please,” he says, the corner of his lip quivering as he speaks, “ _please_. I’m going to destroy this fucking city and you’re going to tell everyone and- and you have to, because- because they’re going to die and _no one wants that,_ right…?”

“Wil,” Alex says, “you… you don’t have to do this shit, man, we can figure it out, we’re _going to_ figure it out, you don’t have to, to _resort_ to this so quickly-“

“-you don’t understand, Quackity, I’m sorry- I’m _so_ sorry, there’s no other way, you don’t understand, I _have to do this_ , I have to go-“

Between holding on to their past and pushing away the future relentlessly, Alex lets him go. Wilbur stands up swaying on his feet ( _he’s always been lanky but Primes, looking at him now, Schlatt wonders when the last time he ate was_ ), still muttering nonsense, still looking like he’s about to break down crying at any moment, still in complete hysterics as he stumbles away. Back out where he came from — which is to say that Schlatt still has no fucking clue how he got into their house in the middle of the fucking woods.

“ _Thank you_ ,” Wilbur breathes, barely loud enough for Schlatt’s sharp ears to catch, looking at him earnestly, “you two should probably fucking run too.”

( _What Schlatt doesn’t catch is the way Wilbur shudders, bunches up his jumper in one hand to his chest, and hesitates, trying not to_ want _too much._ )

And then he leaves the room, taking with him the buzzing of static magic in the air that Schlatt hadn’t noticed was there until it disappeared. He hears their front door open and slam close, but when he looks out the window a minute later, there is no sign of Wilbur at all.

He turns to Alex. Alex looks destroyed.

There’s so much more that Schlatt wants to ask; so much he wants to say, to admit, to know. He wants to chase after Wilbur and argue with him until he runs out of air and convince- no, _beg_ him not to be a complete psycho and destroy the city, to grab him by the shoulders and shake him back to his senses and make him realize that yes, _there is another way, there has to be_. But he’d stayed quiet as Alex snapped, and that might have made all the difference, but hell if he knows whether his words would’ve swayed a Wilbur who’d set his mind dead on something.

In a way, he’s glad he let Wilbur go, because as much as he’d like to brag that he’s great at reading people, there is just so, _so_ much more he knows he can never understand. And Schlatt’s not going to lose any sleep wrecking his brain on _what if_ ’s and _what could’ve been_ ’s; he takes what he can get and deals with the repercussions when they come. No point in dwelling on it any longer than he has to, not when there are lives to save and people to stop.

“C’mon,” he mutters to Alex, reaching out to grab his hand, his thumb moving instinctively to rub circles on his skin, “let’s go.”

Alex clutches onto him like a lifeline. They don’t let go for a long time.

* * *

**7 - Phil:**

People have an innate fear of the unknown.

It’s part of the set of instincts that come with being a sentient being. Fear of falling, fear of death, fear of looking into the abyss a thousand times and having a different face stare back at you each time. The idea that something is completely and hopelessly out of your control terrifies even the most powerful of entities — _especially_ the most powerful of entities.

It makes Phil’s very being quicken at the thought. He remembers times when his kids would come to him with wide eyes and terror in their faces; Techno fears the unpredictability that comes with dealing with people he can’t possibly _know_ like he knows himself; Wilbur fears the ocean, the thought of drowning miles beneath the reach of the sun; Tommy fears the dark because all his life he’s been a creature of light, surrounded by light, raised in light.

Most of all, impossibly, paradoxically, they all fear losing stability. The tentative family they’ve carved out over the course of a decade, relationships carefully woven between and over and under each other, people they entrusted with the most damning of secrets.

Phil knows it’s over for him when that innate fear of the unknown morphed into a horrible fear _for_ the unknown.

He remembers looking at his children and realising that there’s nothing more human than being afraid for someone with your whole heart. Remembers thinking that he would never fear for anything more than he does his children. Remembers holding onto that idea and promising himself he’d never let go, stupidly clinging to the hope that this is enough.

And most of all, he remembers having all of that torn away from him, remembers tearing it all away from himself the moment he decided to point a sword at Wilbur.

Remembering hurts more than it ever made him happy. The kindest gift the universe has given him is the human memory with all its flaws, and these are the moments he wants to forget: Wilbur poking at his broken clock trying to get it to light up, Wilbur trying his best not to laugh at a dumb video on the internet, Wilbur staring him down with a chaos spirit in tow and challenging him to turn the child away.

He wants to go back knowing he wouldn’t change a single thing, and it’d still end with him begging the universe for what could’ve been. He wants to write a different story knowing it would only be a desperate romanticisation of the original. He wants to hope that after all of this, there would still be a son to cry for and a home to return to.

He wishes for all of it back. Honesty, absolution, longing, all for himself. Just this once.

Schlatt and Quackity break the news to them. Wilbur is going to destroy the city and everyone in it. For one teetering moment, Phil hesitates as he always does; then everything in him sparks alive and ignites every last bit of doubt that’s ever dared to cross his mind.

' _Please_ ,' he thinks, ' _my sons above all_ ,' because he’s witnessed firsthand the birth of stars and hope feels exactly like that — a supernova, burning through his heart as he wishes and wishes _and wishes_ ; he may know how the threads of the universe work but he’ll never predict when he’ll next see his son.

He wants it all back, he wants more than what’s been given to him, he wants them to go home, and this defiance ignites in him, bright and reckless and _so_ _fucking terrifying_.

Everything’s changed, nothing changes. Tommy steps forward, turns to him expectantly. Technoblade retreats, turns to his weapons.

Half a year ago, if he could rewrite their story, he’d have written it like this: an angel stays in heaven, a hybrid stays in the Nether, a chaos spirit stays in bedlam, and Wilbur gets to live.

Today, if he can rewrite their story, he won’t.

His sons above all. Fear eclipses his hope, but he’ll move the fucking moon if it meant that he gets to save his son.

.

Wilbur never asked the question a third time, but Phil had heard it anyway. It was written all over his face; anticipation dragging down the muscles of his cheeks, haunting the perpetual bags under his eyes, making him look so… tired, that Phil wondered how the _fuck_ one man can live with so much fear.

( _Though in hindsight, he realises it wasn’t fear. They’ve moved past fear by that point; it had morphed into acceptance._ )

“Are you going to kill them?”

( _Phil thinks,_ ‘I almost killed you because I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you,' _because how fucked up would that be, how disgustingly poetic would it be for a father to kill his own son to save him?_ )

He looked up at Wilbur. He had to, because his first instinct told him to comfort his son and his next one lit up a quiet apprehension in his chest, burning like a matchstick ready to be thrown into a drum of oil.

“The person…?” he asked.

Wilbur shifted from foot to foot, hiding his hands behind his back. “Yeah.”

Phil levelled Wilbur’s gaze, because only one of them knows what he’s doing, only one of them knows what had to be done, only one of them was strong enough to do it. That didn’t quench the irrationality, though.

Violence breeds violence, kindness breeds kindness, and honesty breeds honesty — Phil looked into Wilbur’s eyes, all shrouded in lies yet open, raw, _honest,_ begging him to see the truth, and he’d stumbled on his words before settling on, “They don’t deserve it.”

One thing that was terrifyingly true was the way Wilbur’s shoulders sagged, anger and hope blooming on his face, twisting the muscles on his cheeks. His eyes were red. Phil wondered when that had happened.

Phil said, “You have nothing to worry about.”

Phil said, “It’ll work.”

Phil said, “Things will be alright by tomorrow.”

Wilbur ducked his head, looked away, said, “Yeah,” and left.

.

( _And months later, when Phil can’t stop seeing Wilbur’s deranged smile on the back of his eyelids and hearing his voice break for the thousandth time, he wonders if there’s still anything salvageable, if there’s anything that hasn’t broken beyond repair and shattered when he tried to fix it._

‘I’m home,' _he thinks, '_ home is here, and one day everything will be alright again-' _and then, desperately, because these days he’s starting to lean into the notion that desperation can be innate,_ ‘I promise, I do, I do, I do.’

_He’s had millennia to study human beings, and a decade to live among them, and he knows that some people are naturally apathetic, ready to drop things the second they start to doubt. So it stands to reason that the opposite must be true, too._

_He thinks about Wilbur._

_He thinks, and he thinks, and then he thinks some more, and here are the things that he knows to be true._

_One: Wilbur wants to be human. Just like himself._

_Two: Wilbur is afraid to die. Just like everyone else._

_Three: Wilbur is going to blow up the city. Just like he promised he would._ )

.

Tommy stops him for the third time, for the final time, and shit, maybe he _is_ a mind reader. Or, the more likely alternative, that he’s given in to desperation too. He grabs Phil by the arm, forces their eyes to meet, speaks with all the conviction of someone who’s ready to fight their hopeless fate.

“Are you going to kill him?”

And Phil… Phil feels his heart swell with pride.

Tommy has always been the bravest one of them all; the one who had been struck the hardest by the revelation, the one who _still refuses to give up_.

“You didn’t turn me away,” Tommy says, “you _knew_ what I was, you _know_ what I can do. I can destroy the world if I want, Phil, _all of us can_.” He furrows his eyebrows, eyes earnest and steely and… hopeful.

_Some people are innately apathetic. Some people are innately desperate. Others are hopeful, blinding pillars of optimism, dancing with nimble feet along the line separating them from naïvety._

Tommy has always been the bravest one of them all. Phil admires this about him.

His son lowers his head, almost imperceptibly. Horns bent at an angle where Phil can easily snatch them.

_Trust_.

“Please,” he whispers.

“He’s my son,” Phil says finally, shocked right out of his silent stupor by a jolt of relief as he makes up his mind, “no matter what. He’s my _fucking son_.”

.

This is what it all comes down to.

Phil’s never going to be able to take back all the times that he told Wilbur how _evil_ he is, how he’s going to destroy everything and hurt everyone.

He’s never going to make up for ignorance, for being selfish at the wrong moments.

He’s never going to go back in time, to rewrite their story, because _he can’t_. The ink’s been set in paper, blotched all over and forever stained by mistakes.

All that’s left for him is to move forward. To keep going, and write, and hope that the ending might suffice.

He thinks: _Desperation is the price we both pay for being human_. _No one’s inherently evil, just desperate enough._

He thinks: _This is a story about desperation and we’ve all moved past the point of panic_.

He writes: _We keep going anyway_.

* * *

**8 - Wilbur:**

Wilbur dreams.

He dreams of things that shouldn’t make any sense.

But first he sleeps; Wilbur doesn’t sleep much anymore, not when there’s the constant danger of being stationary at night, or at day, or any time at all. He can count on one hand the number of times he’s had a full night’s sleep while on the run, and today just so happens to be luckier than the others.

He dreams of fields that go on forever in all directions. Of bending down and touching the flowers, putting a name to every flower and a colour to every name. Of his feet padding against the ground, parting the grass as he runs and runs and runs.

He dreams of being stranded on a rock in the middle of the sea. Of dipping his toes into the water and feeling the ocean breeze in his hair. Of looking down and seeing an endless abyss underneath him, of looking up and realising the shore has long disappeared.

He dreams of flying. Of falling. And then he dreams of dying, of a sword impaling him and leaving him to die, or the more likely alternative where in reality, he’s working towards burning up in an inferno with the city and the darkness underneath.

( _He doesn’t dream of home._

_He doesn’t dream of his father and his two brothers._

_But he thinks about them; every night when he’s sitting in a dark corner somewhere and wrapping his arms around himself to stave off the cold; every day when he gets up and finds a feral creature to neutralise and feed his perpetual hunger; every waking moment where he spots a friend in the corner of his eye and he shoves his crossed fingers into his pockets and runs._

_His chest tightens and hurts whenever he thinks about them. He welcomes it. He hasn’t lived without pain for months now._ )

Wilbur wakes up from his dream. He wipes the moisture from his eyes and stretches the crick in his neck.

He’s got work to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you all enjoyed this chapter!!!! leave some kudos or comments and lmk what you think ! as always i welcome any and all forms of feedback and they make my day and give me motivation to write!!
> 
> anyway cya next update where we’re getting into the Climax and also diving deep into (rubs hands) tommy and wilbur’s relationship as brothers letsgo letsgo 
> 
> meanwhile check out [THIS FUCKING STORY OH MYGOD](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28269930) if you like dsmp fics and also are a sucker for some Good Angsty Wilbur Content 
> 
> anyway have a good day and ily all <3

**Author's Note:**

> if youre interested in joining a super welcoming and pretty active RPF discord, join [the CHRISTIN server](https://discord.gg/fN65msK6ZY)! 
> 
> we’re comprised of fic Enjoyers from Many Corners of video blogging RPF and writers and readers and artists and lurkers and everything in between are welcome!! 
> 
> BUT IMPORTANT WARNING: the server has a very strict policy of following CC boundaries and on top of that, strict rules for _no irl shipping_ and _no nsfw content_ !


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